After the Downfall (52 page)

“Yes, and that’s part of the problem, too,” Drepteaza said. “Lord Zgomot worried you might go back to the blonds because I wouldn’t go to bed with you. He was angry at me because I didn’t.”

“Oh,” Hasso said. Yeah, Lord Zgomot was a sharp cookie, all right. Hasso didn’t like seeming so transparent, especially to a man he still thought of as more than half a barbarian. Like it or not, he evidently was. He tried to put the best face on it he could: “You see? You don’t have anything to worry about. Neither does he.” But only because King Bottero’s men had orders to kill one Hasso Pemsel on sight. If they didn’t ...
If they didn’t, I’d be back in Drammen now.
Luckily, the Bucovinans didn’t know anything about that. Hasso’s little sleep spell accomplished so much, anyhow.

“I would screw you to keep you from going back to Bottero and Velona. If that is what it takes, I will do it,” Drepteaza said. Hasso’s jaw dropped. He knew the Bucovinans were blunt, but he hadn’t thought they were
that
blunt. When he didn’t say anything, Drepteaza went on, “If you want me to like you while I’m doing it, though, I think you would be asking too much.”

“Oh,” Hasso said again. Not even
How about that?
or
Isn’t that interesting?
seemed safe here.

“You may not care, of course. Some men only care about the screwing itself, not whether anything lies behind it. Some women, too, no doubt, but I think fewer,” Drepteaza said. “I got the idea you weren’t one of those, or you would have been happy enough with Leneshul or Gishte. But maybe I was wrong.”

You can have me. I’ll make nice, even if I really want to spit in your eye.
Drepteaza was right. Plenty of men would have been happy enough with that bargain, or vain enough to be sure they were such wonderful lovers, she would melt with delight as soon as they got it in. Had he been offered a woman like Gishte or Leneshul on terms like that, chances were he would have taken her. What she thought of him afterwards wouldn’t have mattered to him. With Drepteaza, it did. That was what made her different from the others.

Or maybe I’m just a damn fool. Shit, I wouldn’t be surprised.

“If you’re ever interested, likely you can find a way to let me know,” he said. She looked at him for a long time. It seemed like a long time, anyway. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “I am in your debt, and - under the circumstances - I have no easy way to pay you back.” She walked off without waiting for an answer.

“Under the circumstances.
Ja
.” Hasso said it in German, so she wouldn’t have understood it even if she heard it. But he didn’t think she did. She seemed determined to get away from him as fast as she could. Under the circumstances ... He’d barely found out what Velona’s name was before she gave him the time of his life. Drepteaza didn’t work like that - not with him, anyway. These people weren’t Catholics. There wasn’t anything here about priestesses having to be virgins. But... He’d had his chance, and he’d blown it. He probably was a fool. He sure felt like one right this minute. Well, if he felt like one in the morning he could tell Drepteaza he’d changed his mind, and how about it, cutie?

In the meantime, he went down to the buttery and asked for the biggest beaker of beer in the place. He’d seen this coming, but maybe not so soon. The tapman didn’t even blink. He just handed Hasso a drinking horn with enough beer in it to drown a rhino. Hasso had to work to drain it, but drain it he did. Then he thrust it back at the Bucovinan. “Fill it up again,” he said. The beer made his brains buzz, but he remembered to use the imperative.

“Whatever you’ve got, you’ve got it bad,” the tapman said.

“I don’t know
what
you’re talking about,” Hasso said with exaggerated dignity. The native took that for a joke, and laughed. So did Hasso, right up until he started to cry.

XXIII

Hasso had had his share of rocky mornings since splashing down into the marsh by the causeway. This one was a rock like Gibraltar. He staggered down to the buttery for a little porridge and some beer. With luck, no one would talk to him, and he would have the chance to forget how badly he’d hurt himself. As soon as he saw Scanno, he feared luck wouldn’t be with him. As soon as Scanno saw him, he knew all his fears would be realized. “You look like something the cat threw up,” the renegade remarked. His loud, cheerful voice reverberated between Hasso’s ears. Anything loud and cheerful inclined Hasso toward suicide, or possibly homicide. “I’ve been better,” he said - quietly. Scanno couldn’t take a hint. “Tied one on, yesterday, didn’t you?” he boomed. He wasn’t quite so loud as King Bottero would have been, but not from lack of effort.

“How did you guess?” The less Hasso said, the less he gave Scanno to grab on to, the better the chance the other man would shut up and go away. He could dream, couldn’t he?

But Scanno wasn’t going anywhere. “You’re a hero,” he said. “What do you need to go out and get plowed for? I mean plowed bad, not plowed happy - you hurt yourself, pal.”

“No kidding,” Hasso said, and then, “You ought to know. You get drunk all the time yourself.”

“Yeah, sure.” Scanno didn’t waste time telling him he was talking through his hat. “But I like getting drunk and sloppy. You mostly don’t. So what did you go and do it for yesterday?”

“None of your business,” Hasso said sweetly.

“Gotta be a broad,” Scanno said, which was much too perceptive for that early in the morning - and for how bad Hasso felt. “So which broad is it, and how come she won’t give you a tumble?”

“Shut up and piss off,” Hasso said, more sweetly still. Scanno laughed. Hasso started to get to his feet. He would have relished a fight just then, which went a long way toward saying how hung over he was.

“Take it easy. If I pull out my sword, you’re dead,” Scanno said.

“If you pull out your sword, I shove it up your ass,” Hasso told him. Scanno might have been a renegade, but he was a Lenello, with a Lenello’s prickly pride. Telling him not to do something only made him want to do it more. “You asked for it,” he said, and started to draw. Hasso’s hand clamped down on his wrist. Scanno swore and tried to break free. He was a better swordsman than Hasso ever would be. As a wrestler, though, he might as well have been a child. Hasso threw him to the rammed-earth floor of the buttery.

“I’ll kill you for that!” Scanno shouted.

As his hand flashed to the hilt of his sword again, Hasso kicked him in the wrist. He didn’t know whether he broke it or not. He didn’t much care, either, though he wouldn’t have been surprised. Scanno howled and clutched at himself. If he was going to do any swordfighting, he would have to do it lefthanded.

“Don’t mess with me.” Hasso stood over him, breathing hard. “Don’t even think about messing with me. You mess with me, I make you sorry you were ever born. Then I set a spell on you and make you wish you were dead.”

Scanno plainly weighed knocking his feet out from under him. Hasso would have stomped his hand if he tried. The German’s eagerness to do just that must have shown on his face, because Scanno tried no such thing. He kept his defiance to words: “That puke of an Aderno couldn’t magic me, and you can’t, either.”

“Ha!” Hasso laughed harshly. “I tear off your stupid dragon-bone amulet, and
then
I cast my spell.”

His mouth was running a good ten meters ahead of his brain. He had no idea what he would say till it popped out. But when he heard himself, his jaw dropped. He forgot all about Scanno. The renegade could have upended him and pounded him to powder. Hasso might not even have noticed.

“Fuck me,” he said in German. “Oh, son of a bitch.
Fuck
me.”

“What are those funny noises?” Scanno asked, still cradling his injured wrist with his other arm.

“Never mind.” Hasso stepped away from him. If Scanno wanted to get up, the
Wehrmacht
officer had stopped caring. He grabbed his mug of beer off the table, emptied it at a gulp, and hurried out of the buttery.

Scanno stared after him. “I think he’s gone out of his tree,” he said. None of the staring Bucovinans in there argued with him.

Hasso knew the way to Lavtrig’s chapel. It boasted more fancy decoration than the one in Castle Drammen dedicated to the goddess. That only made him surer he’d got it right before: the less a deity actually did, the more ornament he or she needed to disguise that laziness. Drepteaza was lighting a silver lamp in front of a gilded statue of the chief Bucovinan god when Hasso walked in. (He thought the statue was gilded, anyhow; it might have been solid gold.) What burned in the lamp smelled of perfume and, under that, hot lard. The priestess glanced up in surprise. “Good morning, Hasso. What is it?” After a moment, she added, “By the look on your face, it must be something important.”

“You might say so. Yes, you just might.” Hasso nodded emphatically. “We need to talk - right now.”

Her mouth tightened. “Are you sure? Or will it only cause more trouble and pain than it eases?”

“It will cause trouble and pain, all right - for the Lenelli,” Hasso answered.

“Then I will listen,” Drepteaza said at once. “Can we talk here, or do you need to go someplace where no one else can listen?”

He looked around. A couple of other Bucovinan priests, of rank lower than hers, were puttering around in there. “It doesn’t matter. They can hear. I think I know why magic doesn’t work so well around Falticeni. I think I can make it so Lenello magic doesn’t bite on Grenye most of the time. Not always, I suspect, but most of the time.”

Her eyes widened. The way she looked at him ... It might almost have been the way a lover eyed her beloved. Almost, but not quite. Hasso made himself not think about that. It didn’t matter, not for this.

“Well, you’ve got me interested,” Drepteaza said. “Tell me more.”

“I do that,” Hasso said. “In this palace, you have the tooth of a dragon.”

“Yes. It is a treasure. And so?”

“Under the walls here, you have more bones of this dragon, right?”

“Of course we do. We are proud that we managed to kill it. We are lucky that we killed it, too. If we hadn’t, it could have wrecked Falticeni worse than the Lenelli might.”

“
Ja
.” All Hasso had seen of the late, unlamented dragon was that one fang, but it was plenty to convince him. “You know that magic does not bite on Scanno the renegade?”

“I have heard it, yes,” Drepteaza said. “I don’t know for myself that it’s true, but I have no reason to doubt it.”

“It’s true. I see - I
saw
- it for myself. It drove Aderno crazy, trying to figure out why his spell wouldn’t work.” Hasso remembered how the wizard had experimented on a Grenye woman to find out, too. He didn’t say anything about that to Drepteaza. Instead, he went on, “Scanno wears a little piece of dragon bone on a thong around his neck for an amulet.”

He wondered if she would make the connection. It seemed obvious to him. But lots of things that seemed obvious to him didn’t to the locals, Lenelli and Grenye alike. Sometimes, in this world, they weren’t. Sometimes he just had a different way of looking at them. They didn’t think as logically as he did. Barring a few clerics, the folk in medieval Germany wouldn’t have, either. By the standards of this world, Drepteaza was an educated woman. By the standards of any world, she was a bright woman. All the same, the frown that crossed her face said she didn’t get it right away. And then, all at once, she did.

It was like watching the sun come out from behind clouds. “You think dragon bones block spells,” she whispered.

“That’s right,” Hasso said. “That’s just what I think. If all of Lord Zgomot’s soldiers have amulets, if their horses have them, if my pots of gunpowder have them, too ... If that happens, the Lenelli have to fight fair.”

“Fight fair.” Drepteaza went on whispering while she echoed him. “That’s all we ever dreamt of, since they first came across the ocean and landed on our shores. It would be so wonderful.”

“Would be?” Now Hasso echoed her.

As she nodded, the sunshine that blazed from her face faded once more. “We are missing only one thing: dragon bones enough to make the amulets we need. There aren’t many dragons, and the ones there are live far to the north. They’re hard to find, and even harder to kill. Men don’t just hunt dragons. Dragons hunt men, too, and they win more often than we do.”

“Somewhere in Bottero’s realm lies skeleton of a dead dragon,” Hasso said. “Scanno knows where.”

Drepteaza stared at him. He watched the sun come out on her face again. “If you are right,” she said,

“you know what this will do to the Lenelli?”

“I hope I do,” Hasso answered. “I want dragon-bone amulet, too.” So far, his own little spell was holding its own against Aderno and Velona. Here in Falticeni - which also had dragon-bone amulets of a sort - he could believe it would go on holding. If he headed west again? He wasn’t sure what would happen then. He wasn’t anxious to find out, either.

“Does Scanno know why the dragon bone is so important?” Drepteaza asked.

“He ... may.” Hasso explained how he’d brawled with the renegade, and the thoughts the brawl called to mind.

“Riskier to send him back into Bottero’s kingdom, then,” she said. “If he can tell us where the skeleton lies, we can have people who don’t know why they’re doing it collect the bones and bring them back to Bucovin.”

“You should be a marshal,” Hasso said. If the people getting the bones didn’t know what they were good for, the Lenelli could torture them or cast spells at them till everything turned blue without finding out. The
Wehrmacht
officer did hold up a warning hand. “Not sure skeleton is still there. Scanno says he’s had his amulet for years now.”

“Well, if it’s gone, we’ll think of something else, that’s all,” Drepteaza said with a shrug. “This is the best chance we have, and we need to grab it.” She dropped Hasso a curtsy. “Bucovin is in you debt. I’m sure Lord Zgomot will reward you as you deserve.”

“What about you?” Hasso asked.

“It is not my place,” Drepteaza said primly. “He is the Lord of Bucovin.”

“Too bad. He is not too young and not too pretty,” Hasso said.