After the Downfall (43 page)

“What?” Only when Drepteaza asked did he realize he’d spoken German.

“Nothing. Nothing I can do anything about now, anyway,” Hasso answered sheepishly. “Something from back in the world I come from.”

“Oh.” Drepteaza sent him a shrewd look. “Something that has to do with a woman there?”

She might be shrewd, but that didn’t make her right. He shook his head. “No, not with a woman. With my kingdom, and with its affairs.” The
Reich
wasn’t a kingdom, of course, but explaining what it was was beyond him in either Lenello or Bucovinan. It might have been beyond him in German, too. Drepteaza didn’t press him, which was something of a relief. She just said, “I hope you’ll remember you’re here now.”

He nodded. “I’m not likely to forget it,” he said.

“Ha!” Scanno called when Hasso came down to the soldiers’ buttery a couple of days later. The renegade set down his spoon -
he
was eating tripe soup that morning. He went on, “They do let you out every now and again.”

“Yes, every now and again.” Hasso didn’t feel like talking to him - and then, all of a sudden, he did.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Scanno spooned up another mouthful of soup. Then he said, “You can always ask. If I don’t like it, maybe I’ll kick you into the middle of next week.”

“You can always try,” Hasso said politely - too politely. He wasn’t afraid of Scanno, not even a little bit. The renegade scowled at him: Scanno was as arrogant and full of himself as any other Lenello. Hasso didn’t care. He asked, “When Aderno tries to put a spell on you in Drammen, how do you know he can’t?”

“Oh. That!” Scanno laughed. “On account of I’ve had other wizards try to ensorcel me, and not a one of

‘em could do it. Not since I was a kid, matter of fact.”

“Really?” Hasso said.

“Sure. Why the demon would I waste my time lying to you?” Scanno returned to his tripe soup, which seemed more interesting to him than Hasso was. “Makes your insides hurt not quite so bad, anyway,” he remarked.

“Yes, I know,” Hasso said, at which the renegade laughed. “Have you got any idea why this is so?”

Hasso persisted.

Scanno started to shake his head, then thought better of it. Hung over, Hasso had made that same quick choice more than once. Just talking hurt less, and Scanno did: “Never even worried about it. It’s something about me, that’s all, like I’ll spend the night farting if I eat leeks for supper.”

“Right,” Hasso said - sometimes you could find out more about somebody than you really wanted to know. He tried a different angle: “Do you remember when this starts? Not when you are a child?”

“No, after that, like I told you.” Scanno frowned, trying to remember. “If you’re smart, you don’t
want
wizards trying to mess with you,” he observed. Hasso didn’t say anything. He’d already seen that Scanno wasn’t smart that way. And, sure as hell, the renegade continued, “Must’ve been about fifteen years ago. I called some high and mighty wizard a cocksucking son of a whore, and he told me he’d turn me into a pig for that. And the bastard tried, and he couldn’t.”

“And what do you do - what
did
you do - afterwards?” Hasso asked.

“I pitched his sorry arse into a hog wallow, and better than he deserved, too,” Scanno answered. “I’ve had a couple of other run-ins with those walking chamber pots since, and they’ve never been able to bother me.”

“I see.” Actually, Hasso wished he did. He’d taken Scanno’s immunity to magic as part and parcel of what made spells falter near Falticeni. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was personal. Well, that could be interesting, too. “How do you suppose this happened? Spells work on most Lenelli, yes?”

“Sure,” Scanno said. “I always figured it was because I was such a tough bastard.” He would have seemed tougher if his hands didn’t shake and if his eyes didn’t look like a couple of pissholes in the snow. Instead of pointing that out, Hasso said, “If you ever see why, talk to me. Talk to Drepteaza. Talk to Lord Zgomot. The Bucovinans want to know - they need to know - how to keep magic from biting on them when they get far from Falticeni.”

“Tell me about it, the poor, sorry bastards.” Scanno laughed. “Can you see Bottero’s face if it
didn’t
bite?” That made Hasso laugh, too, because he could. Then Scanno said, “Boy, wouldn’t it make the goddess on earth pee in her drawers?”

Hasso didn’t deck him. That only proved he had even more discipline than he’d ever imagined. He did make a growling noise down deep in his throat - he couldn’t help it. The worst of it was knowing Scanno was right. If magic did fail against Bucovin, Velona would be incandescent. She was gone, lost. She wanted him dead. He wanted her back. The Grenye in Drammen had plenty of reasons to get drunk. So did Hasso, in Falticeni.

XIX

Lenello raiders went on harrying Bucovin’s western villages all through the winter. They kept some of the towns they seized. That bothered Lord Zgomot, who said, “They are going to jump off from those places when they really pick up the war again come spring.”

“Well, of course,” Hasso said when word of the Lord of Bucovin’s comment got to him through Drepteaza. He heard everything second-and third-and fifth-hand, when he heard of it at all.

“This is not what the Lenelli usually do,” she said.

“I wonder why not,” Hasso said. “Are they really so stupid? I did not think so when I was with them.”

That got him summoned before Zgomot. “Did you give the blonds the idea of biting and holding on instead of biting and letting go?” the Lord of Zgomot demanded.

“I don’t know, Lord,” Hasso answered. “I don’t think so. I don’t remember talking about it with them, not like that. King Bottero just thinks one fast campaign will break Bucovin.” Hasso had thought the same thing. Why not? He hadn’t known any better. Hitler had thought the same thing about the Russians. Well, so much for that. So much for this, too.

“Maybe you made them think about the way wars are supposed to work,” Lord Zgomot said. “Lavtrig knows you’ve done that with us. We don’t see things the way we did before we caught you - all the gods know that’s so.”

Was that praise? Hasso supposed it was, though he suspected the Lord of Bucovin wasn’t sure, either.

“You were going to send out raiders, Lord,” the German remembered. “Any luck with them?”

“Not much,” Zgomot answered. “The border is ... the border. Magic works there - it works just fine. We could not gain surprise.”

“Ah.” Hasso wondered whether this clever little Grenye would ask him to give the raiders some kind of sorcerous smoke screen. He thought he might be able to figure out how to do that. He wasn’t a trained wizard, but he’d seen that he could make magic work.

But Zgomot asked him nothing of the sort. Hasso remembered what he’d heard about the natives and sorcery. A wizard who’d work magic for them would decide that, as the seeing man in the country of the blind, he ought to show them which way they should go. And, if they didn’t feel like going that way, he would try to make them do it. No, their experience with sorcery was far from happy. Instead, the Lord of Bucovin said, “Will we have enough gunpowder to fight the big blond bastards excuse me, Hasso Pemsel: the big blond
Lenello
bastards - when they invade us this spring? Because they will - or do you doubt it?”

“No, Lord, I don’t,” Hasso answered. For a long time, Hitler had disguised his aggressive plans. Bottero didn’t waste any time trying. The Lenelli were very direct in their dealings with Grenye.
You have it. I
want it. I’m going to take it.

“The gunpowder?” Zgomot prompted.

“Sorry, Lord. My thoughts go somewhere else. Yes, we should have enough. If their wizards figure out how to set it off at a distance, though ... What we have then is trouble.”

Lord Zgomot took that in stride. “When did Grenye have anything but trouble since the big blond bastards first washed ashore here? Never once. And there are all kinds of trouble, too. You know King Bottero is married to old King Iesi’s daughter?”

Hasso knew Queen Pola came from the Lenello realm just north of Bottero’s. He’d forgotten Iesi’s name, if he ever knew it. But he could say, “Yes, Lord,” without stretching things too far.

“Well, I hear Iesi may move east, too,” the Lord of Bucovin said. “I don’t know whether his army will come separately under his command or march along with King Bottero’s in one big host. But they may move.”

“If they come by themselves, we should hit them first,” Hasso said.

“Oh? Why?”

“Because Bottero already knows some of my tricks,” the German replied. “We can surprise Iesi and his men - or I hope we can, anyhow. If we drive him back, then we deal with Bottero.”
Try to deal with
Bottero.
But he kept that to himself.

“You don’t think Bottero will have told Iesi about the kinds of things you do?” That
will have told
perplexed Hasso for a moment; he didn’t hear a future perfect every day. Before he could answer, Zgomot took care of it for him: “No, of course he won’t. If he ever had to fight Iesi or one of the other blond kings, he would want to be able to give him a surprise. Fair enough. If Iesi comes by himself, we try to hit him first and knock him out of the fight.”

He might be mindblind, but he was nobody’s fool. Neither was Bottero, come to that. If you were going to make a halfway decent king, brains were an asset.

“Do you let me fight your enemies, Lord?” Hasso shook his head in exasperation. He felt mindblind himself, fighting with languages he didn’t speak well enough.
“Will
you let me fight your enemies, Lord?”

Zgomot looked pained. Hasso knew things he didn’t and could do things he couldn’t. That made the
Wehrmacht
officer valuable. It made using him necessary and losing him unfortunate. It also made him dangerous. As if that weren’t obvious enough anyway, Hasso came in a large, blond package.

“I do not want you hurt.” The Lord of Bucovin picked his words with care. You didn’t want to offend the captive genie, lest it turn on you. After gnawing at the inside of his lower lip for a moment, Zgomot added, “I do not want to take the chance that you will desert to the Lenelli again, either.”

He must have decided that Hasso could see that he could see the possibility. It was, in the mildest possible way, a compliment. It was one Hasso could have done without. “If you don’t trust me to fight, why do you trust me to make gunpowder for you?” he asked. “Maybe I blow the palace to the sky.”

He’d thought about it.

“Maybe you will,” Zgomot said steadily. “My thinking is, you are less likely to do that if you stay inside the palace yourself.”

Hasso gave him a crooked grin. “My thinking is, you’re right.” He remembered Russians who’d killed without caring for their own lives. Before things really fell to pieces in the
Reich,
the papers had stories about Japanese pilots who flew their airplanes into American warships. Hasso admired their courage without wanting to emulate it. He liked living. Dying at the age of 103, shot by an outraged husband, struck him as a good way to go.

“This also strikes me as one more reason to keep you where you are,” Zgomot said.
Damn!
Hasso thought. He could see why it would strike the Lord of Bucovin that way. “How do I persuade you that you can trust me?” he asked.

Zgomot gave him the courtesy of taking the question seriously. He didn’t answer right away, but plucked at his beard as he thought things over. “If you fight well against Bottero’s men,” he said at last, “that may convince me.”

“If you don’t let me fight against Bottero’s men, how am I supposed to fight well?” Hasso inquired, less acidulously than he might have.

Zgomot stroked his chin again. His eyes twinkled - or maybe it was just a trick of the light. “It is,” he admitted, “a puzzlement.”

Iesi didn’t move. Bottero kept moving. He worked more methodically than he had during the autumn. That invasion had been a blow aimed at Bucovin’s heart. When it failed to reach Falticeni - when it failed, period - the Lenelli pulled back to their own border.

Now Bottero was trying something different. He was taking one town, making sure he had it, and then going on to the next. Making sure he had a town involved either massacring the local Grenye or chasing them off to the east with no more than the clothes on their backs. Some of the women didn’t even get those.

As news of what the Lenelli were doing and how they were doing it came to Falticeni, Lord Zgomot’s face got longer and longer. His own people had to be screaming at him to do something. How long would he stay Lord of Bucovin if he didn’t?

What’ll happen to me if Bucovin gets a new lord?
Hasso wondered. He feared it wouldn’t be good. He also feared Zgomot would order him to use gunpowder against the Lenelli, and he didn’t think the time was ripe.

If you have trouble, attack from an unexpected direction.
That maxim had served the Germans especially Manstein - well in Russia. So Hasso decided he’d better take the initiative with Zgomot before Zgomot took it with him. “Lord, you are in touch with a lot of Grenye inside Bottero’s kingdom, is it not so?” he asked.

“Yes, of course it is so,” Zgomot answered impatiently - his temper was fraying round the edges, something Hasso hadn’t seen from him before. “You ought to know it is so, outlander. If what you told me is true, you did your best to keep them from doing Bucovin any good, and your best was better than I wish it were. So why do you want to know now?”

“Can you touch them off?” Now that Hasso had gunpowder, he could use figures of speech based on it. He hadn’t realized how many of those there were till he had to do without them. “If the peasants blow up behind Bottero’s line, he’ll need to leave Bucovin alone to deal with them.”

“Gods help them when he does,” Zgomot said. Hasso only shrugged. The Lord of Bucovin sent him a measuring stare. “You’re as cold-blooded as a serpent, aren’t you, Hasso Pemsel?”

With another shrug, Hasso said, “If I serve Bucovin, I have to think of Bucovin first, yes?”

“Yes ... if you serve Bucovin.” Zgomot didn’t mean it the same way Hasso had. Well, he had his reasons for doubting the German. His biggest reason likely was that Hasso looked like a Lenello. Besides, Hasso was fighting on King Bottero’s side when the Bucovinans captured him. The Lord of Bucovin wouldn’t forget it, or that Hasso had been boffing the goddess on earth. None of that would inspire confidence, not from Zgomot’s point of view.
All right, maybe my looks aren’t the
biggest reason,
Hasso thought.
But they sure aren’t the smallest one, either.
Back to business now. “What I tell you to do probably does hurt King Bottero,” Hasso said. “I don’t see how it can hurt Bucovin. A lot of Grenye in Bottero’s kingdom aren’t even Bucovinans.”