After the Downfall (36 page)

Well, he’d found out what could, all right. And here he was in a strange world, older and more scarred and screwing his head off not for love or even lust but out of fear.

That helped wear him out, too. One night, he fell asleep right after supper. If Leneshul came to his room that evening, she quietly left again, and he never knew it. And so ... he dreamt. And whatever had chased him for so long finally caught up with him.

“Hasso!” He heard his own name echoing, as if down a long, windy corridor. “Hasso Pemsel!”

He didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to acknowledge. The harder he fled, though, the more his name pursued him. Names had power. So the wizards said, and here he was a wizard - of sorts. At last, hounded, he stood and turned at bay. “What?” he shouted back into the void. Time passed. A minute? An hour? It was a dream - he couldn’t be sure. Time: that was all he knew. Then, dimly, a face appeared in the void, a face he knew.
Aderno’s face,
he realized. “By the goddess, I’ve had a demon of a time raising you!” the wizard said.

When he named the goddess, Hasso seemed to see the cult statue floating beside him. The German also seemed to see Velona’s face instead, or perhaps as well. He had trouble being sure which, but what difference did it make? It was only a dream ... wasn’t it? “Well, here I am,” Hasso said. Aderno nodded. “We heard you’d lived,” he said. “We weren’t sure, but it seems to be true. That was why Bottero tried to ransom you.”

“Yes, I’m still around. They take me to Falticeni,” Hasso said. Even in a dream, he stuck to the present tense as much as he could when speaking Lenello.

“You’re not - telling them anything, are you?” Aderno sounded more anxious than perhaps he thought he did. Maybe covering up was harder in a dream. Or was Aderno dreaming? So much Hasso didn’t know.

“No, I don’t say anything,” he replied. “You are well? Bottero is well? Velona is well? Mertois is well?”

He asked after people he knew. He didn’t waste time asking after Orosei - he knew the master-at-arms was dead.

“Mertois has a broken leg. He will limp ever after,” Aderno said. “The rest of us are well enough. Bottero and Velona are wild for revenge against the savages. The Grenye can’t do that to real men and expect to get away with it.”

The first few times the Ivans gave the
Wehrmacht
a good clout, German soldiers felt the same way. Poland and the West and the Balkans had been easy. Nothing came easy in Russia, not even the victories. And, as year followed year, those got harder and harder to find.
Sorry, Aderno. You don’t get
walkovers forever, no matter how much you wish you did.

Or maybe you did with magic. The Lenelli sure thought so. They’d stripped themselves thin of wizards before the latest battle. What they’d had was Hasso, in fact. But nobody’d suggested that he try a spell to see if the Bucovinans were up to any funny business. Nobody’d imagined they could be. So much for understanding the enemy!

When Hasso didn’t answer right away, Aderno said, “We can do it! By the goddess, outlander, we can!”

When he called on the goddess again, the cult statue grew more distinct. So did Velona’s face. Were they two sides of the same coin? Hasso was no damn good at such things. The doctrine of the Trinity and the notion of transubstantiation only made his head ache. It wasn’t the goddess’ voice that called to him, though. It was Velona’s: “Are you all right, Hasso Pemsel?”

“Hello, sweetheart. Yes, I’m doing well enough, I guess,” Hasso answered. “I hope you are.”

“I miss you,” she said. “I didn’t think I would, but I do. I want to get you back. If I have to burn down all of Bucovin to do it and kill all the stinking Grenye savages in the way, I will.”

Not even the
Führer
was that blunt. Hasso didn’t doubt she meant every word of it. Whatever else you said about Velona, she’d never once made the acquaintance of hypocrisy.

“Have they tried to trick you into doing things for them? Have they given you sluts to try to make you forget me?” she asked.

“I don’t do anything for them. And I can never forget you. You know that.” Hasso didn’t answer all of the last question. He had to share Velona with the king. How could she get mad at him for somebody like Leneshul?

Maybe you couldn’t keep secrets in a dream. Whether he told her or not, she knew. And she didn’t like it for beans. “I am a goddess! I do what I have to do!” she cried. “You - you’re only a man! How dare you take some smelly little black-haired twat? How
dare
you?”

Much too late, he remembered she hadn’t wanted him sniffing around Grenye serving girls back in Drammen, either. What could he say? That he had no idea whether he’d ever get away from Falticeni?

She should have been able to see it for herself. If she could, she didn’t care - she was playing the woman scorned right up to the hilt.

“Aderno!” she cried. “Center my power while I smite this wretch!”

Hasso
was
a wizard of sorts. An ordinary man might well not have escaped the goddess’ wrath. He could feel it building like heat lightning on a hot summer day in the southern Ukraine. How to flee? How to get away?

He screamed himself awake.

XVI

He must have done some impressive shrieking. Next thing he knew, three guards were in the room with him, each man with a sword in one hand and a torch in the other. Their shadows swooped around and behind them like something out of a scary movie.
Nobody in this whole goddamn world knows what
that means,
Hasso thought miserably.
Nobody but me.

“What happened?” the first guard asked.

“Why did you yell?” said the second.

“Did somebody try to do something to you?” asked the third.

“Don’t be stupid, Elyash,” the first guard said. “Nobody in here but him - and us. Anybody who wants to get at him has to come through us, right? Nobody did, right?”

It wasn’t necessarily so. Hasso wished it were. “Princess Drepteaza come see me?” he asked in his rudimentary Bucovinan.

The guards looked at one another. They didn’t want to bother her in the middle of the night. It wasn’t quite the raw fear that would have made flunkies hesitate before disturbing Velona. That could be dangerous in all kinds of ways, including physically. Drepteaza wouldn’t - couldn’t - blast you where you stood. That didn’t make the little swarthy men eager to wake her up.

But the second guard said, “That shriek he let out ... Maybe we’d better. We can blame it on him.”

Hasso didn’t think he was supposed to catch that. He held his face still. Knowing more of the language than they thought he did couldn’t hurt. After a little more guttural wrangling, the trooper called Elyash went off to see if Drepteaza would come. One of the others used his torch to light a lamp for Hasso. Then they withdrew from the room, leaving him alone in the dim, flickering light. He could have gone back to sleep ... if he’d had the nerve. How many times during the war had he heard a bullet crack past him? More than he could count - he knew that. His scars spoke of times that hadn’t been misses, but he wasn’t thinking about those. He was thinking he might have dodged something worse than a bullet, something on the order of a 155mm shell. And, unlike a 155, it might still be waiting for him if he lay down and closed his eyes.

Will I ever be able to sleep again?
he wondered. Soldiers on the Russian front always talked about sleeping with one eye open so the Ivans couldn’t sneak up and cut their throats. But what happened when somebody could sneak up on you from inside your own head? Hasso shivered. Nothing good, that was what.

“Velona,” he whispered sadly. Why couldn’t she understand about Leneshul, even a little bit? But the answer to that formed as fast as the question. Because she was who and what she was, that was why. She wouldn’t let a native girl upstage her, even if she wasn’t there to be upstaged. What did they call using a woman to get information out of a prisoner? A honey trap. The Bucovinans could have been tearing his toenails out. They could still start any time they pleased, too. Bless them, the fools, they’d given him a woman instead. And he hadn’t even told Leneshul anything. He’d just used her as a nicely rounded sleeping pill to evade bad dreams.

The door opened. In came Drepteaza, her hair all awry and her face twisted from fighting against a yawn. “More trouble in the night?” she asked in Lenello.

“
Ja
,” Hasso said. She nodded; she’d come to understand that. He wished he could go on in German; even in Lenello, he couldn’t speak smoothly. But German, like memories of movies, was his alone here. Lenello, then: “Those dreams in the night - now I know what makes them.”

“And?” Drepteaza waited for him to tell her what she needed to know. The feeble lamplight left her eyes enormous.

“A wizard from Bottero’s kingdom sends to me in my sleep,” Hasso said. Her jaw set, as if she were taking a blow she hoped she was braced for. “I wondered whether that was so,” she said softly, as much to herself, Hasso judged, as to him. She made herself stand straight. “And what does the wizard want?”

“To get me back for the Lenelli.” Hasso answered with the truth. That was what Aderno
had
wanted, anyway, till Velona found out Hasso was laying a Grenye woman. Now they probably both wanted him trussed and roasted and served up with an apple in his mouth like a suckling pig.

“They
think you know things,” Drepteaza remarked. Hasso kept quiet, which struck him as the safest thing he could do just then - not that anything seemed very safe at the moment. The priestess eyed him.

“But these are
bad
dreams for you. Elyash said you screamed tonight: screamed like a man over hot coals, he told me.”

And how did Elyash know what a man sounded like when he hung over hot coals? Better not to inquire, chances were. “This is a bad dream tonight, yes,” Hasso said.

“Why?” Drepteaza asked.

Hasso wondered whether he ought to evade that question. As much as Velona didn’t like native women, Drepteaza didn’t like Velona. The Lenello woman had already tried to fry his brains from the inside out. What would the Bucovinan woman do? Did he want to find out?

On the other hand, what exactly did he scream when he woke up? Did the guards hear it? Did it have Velona’s name in it? If he lied and Drepteaza found out, what would she do then? Again, did he want to find out?

He decided he didn’t. Hell had no fury like a woman scorned? How about a woman hoodwinked? And so, carefully, he said, “Velona is -
was
- in this dream.”

“Oh, really?” No, the Bucovinan priestess didn’t like that, not even a little bit. She didn’t like anything that had anything to do with Velona. But her frown was more one of concentration than of fury - Hasso hoped so, anyhow. “You like Velona, though. You
love
Velona.” Drepteaza made it sound indescribably perverse. “Why do you say seeing her was bad? And why did she appear in the dream in the first place?”

Drepteaza might be a native woman who only came halfway up Hasso’s chest. That didn’t mean she was a fool. Oh, no - on the contrary. How many people in Hasso’s world had come to grief by equating the two? The
Führer
had in Russia. The
Wehrmacht
officer hoped he wouldn’t make the same mistake himself, not when she’d picked two vital questions.

He answered them in the opposite order from which she’d asked them: “She appears because she wants

-
wanted
- to get me back to Drammen.” The past tense mattered here. He kept using it: “And seeing her was bad because she ... got angry because of Leneshul.”

“She did, did she?” Drepteaza laughed. “That’s the funniest thing I ever heard. What does she expect you to do when you’re here and not with her and you won’t be going back to her? Sit around and play with your dick all the time?”

Hasso didn’t care for the sound of
and you won’t be going back to her.
Nothing he could do about it, though. And Velona probably did expect him to do just that, or else to live in the glorious memories of her. Life didn’t work that way, but he thought it was what she expected. Maybe Drepteaza did, too, for she shook her head and exclaimed, “The nerve of that woman!” She really did sound indignant.

“Sorry to bother you,” Hasso said.

“Don’t worry about it. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.” Drepteaza paused, just when Hasso thought she would get in her last little dig and go back to bed. Maybe it was only a trick of the dim, unreliable lamplight, but suddenly she looked much older and much more worried. In a voice that tried to stay casual but didn’t quite succeed, she asked,
“You
don’t have anything to do with magic, do you?”

Rautat had asked him that before, but this time the question took him by surprise. If he’d been expecting it, he could have said,
Of course not,
and that would have been that. But what came out of his mouth was, again, the exact and literal truth: “I can do a little, but I don’t know much about it.”

“You ... can ... do ... a ... little.” He never forgot how Drepteaza spaced out the words, or how enormous her eyes seemed. That was also partly a trick of the light, yes, but it seemed somehow more. She stabbed out a finger at him. “Why didn’t you say so before?”

“What good does it do you? You can’t trust me. Even if you could trust me, I’m not a quarter trained. I’m not a quarter of a quarter trained. What I know is this.” Hasso held his thumb and index finger close together. “What the Lenelli know is
this”
He threw his arms wide. Drepteaza’s eyes narrowed now, narrowed dangerously. She didn’t believe him. “But they wouldn’t care about you if you didn’t know things we don’t.”

“Neither would you,” he pointed out.

“Of course we wouldn’t - are we fools?” She didn’t waste time denying it. “But if they want you back so much, that means - ” She broke off. Hasso could fill in the blank.
That means you’re worth something
after all.

If he denied it, they’d knock him over the head. No more Leneshul. It would be toenail-tearing time. “In the world I come from, there is no magic,” Hasso said. “What I know has nothing to do with magic. It has to do with, uh, arts and craft.” No way to say
technology
or
engineering
in Lenello.