After the Downfall (56 page)

“You think I don’t think so, too?” Hasso said.

Rautat snorted. “Who knows what you think? Who knows if you think?”

“I love you, too,” Hasso said.

“Fat chance,” Rautat said with another snort. “Are we just about finished here? Can we go back to Falticeni pretty soon? We’ve done all the fooling around we need. We have to fight pretty soon - or don’t you think Bottero will come after us again as quick as he can?”

“Of course he will,” Hasso answered. “You know that as well as I do.”

“Well, no.” Rautat shook his head. “You’ve met the man. You know him. I haven’t. I don’t. Being on the same battlefield with him doesn’t count.”

Hasso hadn’t just met Bottero - he liked him. That had nothing to do with anything, not any more. Hasso thought Bottero’s enmity was only professional, not personal like Velona’s. When it came to wanting him dead, that might matter a pfennig’s worth. Or it might not. He stuck to business, saying, “We can go back to Falticeni. You’re right - we’ve done what we came here to do.”

“What about the dragon bones? Have you heard anything?” Rautat asked.

“Not a word,” Hasso said. “You?”

“Nothing,” the underofficer answered. “I wonder which of us they’d tell. I wonder if they’d tell either one of us.”

“They’d better. We need to know,” Hasso said. “And the people going after the dragon bones better get out before King Bottero’s army marches. If they come after, it’s too late.”

“Good point. They can make amulets for themselves and be safe from Lenello magic, not that that does us any good,” Rautat said.

“They can’t even do that,” Hasso said. “They don’t know what the dragon bones are for. They only know Lord Zgomot wants them.”

“You’re right. That’s your fault. We never would have worried about stuff like that by ourselves,” Rautat said.

“One more reason the Lenelli keep beating you,” Hasso said. “Their security isn’t very good. If yours is worse...” He rolled his eyes, but then he brightened. “The dragon bones should ward Zgomot’s men whether they know why or not, come to think of it.”

“Hmm. Yeah, I suppose so.” The Bucovinan paused, eyeing Hasso. “You know something? You’re starting to speak our language pretty well. Not like you grew up in Falticeni or anything, but pretty well. I think it’s better than your Lenello by now.”

“Maybe,” Hasso said. “If it is, I have to thank you and Drepteaza.”

Rautat leered at him. “Well, if you tried sweet-talking the priestess in Lenello, she’d make you sorry, and we both know it.”

Hasso thought about that. Drepteaza angry wouldn’t be an erupting volcano like Velona. She’d make him think a glacier had crushed him instead. Fire or ice? Better not to provoke either. The German said,

“I know you think I’m stupid. I’m not
that
stupid. Hope not, anyhow.”

“I used to think you were stupid,” Rautat said. “Part of it was because you didn’t talk very well, not in any language I know. I’ve found out different since. Stupid you’re not, but you are bloody strange.”

“Everybody says that. You’d be bloody strange in my world, too,” Hasso answered. Landing in his world, Rautat wouldn’t know the customs or speak the language. He’d end up in trouble before he could learn. How could he help it?

“I’d be strange anywhere,” the underofficer said, not without pride. He wasn’t wrong, either. Hasso laughed and clapped him on the back.

The German knew how to deal with Rautat. He’d handled plenty of
Feldwebels
in his
Wehrmacht
days. The language here changed. So did a few of the details. The art as a whole? No. Dealing with Drepteaza as a lover ... That he had to learn one step at a time. It wasn’t simple, either. There were moments when he felt like a man trying to defuse a booby-trapped bomb. The priestess was more private and much more complicated than Velona had been. When Drepteaza was unhappy, she’d retreat into herself. She would stay polite all the time. If you weren’t paying attention, you wouldn’t notice anything was wrong. Then you would lose more points for not noticing. Hasso complained only once. She laughed at him. “This is what you spent so long mooning over and chasing. Now you have it, and you find out it isn’t exactly what you expected? What am I supposed to do about that? I am what I am. I can’t be anything different, not for you or anyone else.”

He shut up after that. She was telling the truth. And she had to put up with him, too. Well, no - in fact, she didn’t. She could dump him any time she pleased.

But she didn’t do that. It was as if she’d decided that, as long as they were going to be lovers, she would see just where that led. “Your world must be a funny place,” she said once, as they lay side by side in a cot that wasn’t really big enough for both of them.

“Why?” he asked.

“You are a fighting man. Rautat says you are one of the most dangerous fighting men he ever saw. From everything I’ve seen, he’s right. But you are the gentlest lover any woman here would ever have known.”

He grunted. Velona never accused him of every such thing. Everybody, he supposed, was different with a different partner.

“Why is that?” Drepteaza persisted.

“Partly, it’s you.” He pursued his own thought. Drepteaza made a small, dubious noise. “It is,” Hasso insisted. “And partly, men and women in my world are closer to equals than they are here.”

“Oh?” That intrigued her in a new way, as he hoped it might. “How? Why?”

Later, he wondered whether Bucovinan - and maybe even Lenello - men would have reason to swear at him. As best he could, he explained how women’s rights had flowered in his world over the past hundred years.

Drepteaza reacted the way he knew she would: “That sounds wonderful! Why isn’t it like that here?”

“I don’t know,” Hasso answered.

“You say it wasn’t always like that where you come from? It used to be more the way it is here?”

Drepteaza waited for him to nod, then went on, “How are things in your kingdom different now from the way they used to be?”

“Machines,” Hasso said automatically. “We have machines to do the things magic can do here. But the machines do it better. They do it for everybody, not just for a few rich people. And with lots of machines, it doesn’t matter so much if men are bigger than women. It doesn’t matter so much if men are stronger. What you know, what you can do - that matters.”

“Women are still the ones who have babies, though,” Drepteaza said.

“Ja”
Hasso nodded.”That is one reason there are still differences. But women have babies more when they want in my world.” He explained about rubbers.

“How do you make them?” Drepteaza demanded. “They would be marvelous!” The Bucovinans - and the Lenelli - used pulling out in time for contraception, when they bothered to pull out in time. They also used blowjobs and buggery, which were more fun for men than for women. Women here had lots of children. Lots of kids died here, but lots were born.

Hasso spread his hands. “No idea.” He hadn’t seen anything like rubber here. And had the locals had it, he didn’t know how to make it thin enough for condoms. There were the ones they called skins, though.... “Sheep gut might do.”

“Like a sausage casing.” Drepteaza giggled and reached for him.
“Just
like a sausage casing.” Even if he didn’t usually manage two rounds close together, he surprised himself and did that night. Afterwards, he slept like a log.

The next morning, as they got ready to go back to Falticeni, Drepteaza kept going on about equality for women, and about condoms. She didn’t seem to be able to think or talk about anything else. Hasso knew he’d changed things here with his knowledge of war. He hadn’t thought what he knew about other things in his lost world might change them here, too.

Listening to Drepteaza talk, he could tell he’d been naive. She was bubbling with excitement, as if she wanted to pack a hundred years into a day. Hasso wasn’t the only one listening to her, either. Rautat sidled up to him and asked, “Why is the priestess all loopy? What kind of bullshit have you been feeding her?”

“I tell her how things are in my world,” Hasso answered uneasily.

“How the broads rule the roost? How nobody there ever gets knocked up, and they find babies under the cabbage leaves?” Rautat was exaggerating - but, if you listened to Drepteaza for a while, you wouldn’t think he was exaggerating by much. He eyed Hasso. “If half of what she says is so, you’re lucky you got out of that place. It’s a demon of a lot better here.”

Hasso
was
lucky he’d got out of his own world, but not for the reasons Rautat imagined. “You may be right,” he said, and let it go at that.

He swung up onto his horse easily enough. He’d ridden on the Eastern Front, too. You couldn’t always find a halftrack or a VW going where you needed to. If you didn’t want to walk, you went on horseback. And he was heading back towards a capital that hadn’t fallen, unlike the one from which the Omphalos stone had hurled him.
A capital more like Moscow than Berlin,
he thought uncomfortably. In some ways, the Lenelli did remind him of the Germans he would never see again. In others, they made him think of the Teutonic Knights, who’d gone east against the Slavs in days gone by - and also eventually ended up losing to them. In still others, they might have been Spaniards or Anglo-Saxons bumping up against Indians.

They weren’t
just
like any of those groups. However you looked at it, though, Hasso wasn’t on the side he would have chosen for himself. Well, sometimes you got your sides chosen for you, that was all. The Bucovinans were people, too. Drepteaza was a very sweet person. Hasso smiled in the saddle. The Ivans he’d fought were also people. He supposed their pagan ancestors who’d faced the Teutonic Knights were people as well. The Red Indians? No doubt about it.

He let out a startled grunt. Maybe even the Jews were people. He hadn’t thought so for years - it wasn’t safe or easy to think so, not in the
Reich.
But he’d known a few back in Weimar days - not well or anything, but he had. They hadn’t seemed... so bad.

If they hated Germans now, hadn’t Germany given them reason to? He didn’t know what all had happened during the war. You didn’t want to know stuff like that, not officially. But what if it was all a big fuckup? Wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass?

XXV

Except for the stinks, Hasso was glad to get back to Falticeni. And Lord Zgomot seemed as glad to have him back as he was ever glad about anything - which is to say, not very. The Lord of Bucovin said,

“So the gunpowder shells work the way you want them to, do they?”

“Close enough, Lord,” Hasso answered.

Zgomot plucked a white hair from his beard. He twirled it between his fingers and let it fall.
“Close
enough
is as much as you can expect in life most of the time, isn’t it?”

“I don’t argue with that, Lord,” the
Wehrmacht
officer said.

“You’d better not,” Zgomot told him. “You’re old enough to know. So tell me, Hasso Pemsel - are you happy now that Drepteaza’s finally sleeping with you?”

“Close enough, Lord,” Hasso repeated, deadpan.

The Lord of Zgomot grunted. “Well, I’ll forgive that from you - you had the Lenello goddess on earth in your bed for a while. That must have been something. Wearing, I’d guess, but something all the same. But tell me this: is Drepteaza happy, now that she’s finally sleeping with you?”

She’d better be, or I’ll make you sorry,
his tone warned. Drepteaza mattered to him. Carefully, Hasso answered, “I think she is also close enough. If you don’t believe me, you can ask her.”

“Oh, I did,” Zgomot said. “I summoned her before I called you. I think you are right, pretty much. I did want to find out how big a braggart you are, now that you finally got something you wanted for a long time.”

“And?” Hasso said.

“And no doubt about it - you are no Lenello. If you were, I would have heard about every thrust, every gasp, every wiggle.” Zgomot raised an eyebrow. “You lived among the blonds. You know they are vain that way.”

From what Hasso had seen, the Bucovinans were blunter about screwing than the Lenelli. Lord Zgomot had a point, though: the Lenelli did invest more vanity in it. Since Hasso didn’t much want to talk about it, he changed the subject, “Are the men back with the dragon bones?”

“No,” the Lord of Bucovin replied, which answered what Hasso’d asked but left him wanting more. More involved another question: “Is Bottero moving yet?”

“Also no, for which I thank Lavtrig and the other gods,” Zgomot said.

“Yes,” Hasso said, though he believed in none of the Bucovinan gods. He wouldn’t have believed in the Lenello goddess, either, if he hadn’t been compelled to believe there was
something
there. “The border isn’t closed, then.”

“No, it is not,” Zgomot agreed. Hasso nodded to himself. Since he’d gone over to the other side, the Lenelli were liable to have decided all his security worries and precautions were nothing but a load of crap. He hoped they did. That would make defending against them a hell of a lot easier. With a sigh, Zgomot went on, “But when Bottero does move, we are going to have to get through another invasion. Another year’s crops ruined in the west. Another year of burning and murder and rape.”

“That is what war is,” Hasso said. “Only one thing worse than to go through it.”

“Oh?” The Lord of Bucovin raised an eyebrow. “I would not have thought anything was worse. I do not think anything is worse.”

“One thing is,” Hasso insisted. “To go through a war and lose - that is worse. That is what happens happened - to my land, in my world. That is why I am here.” To try so much, to suffer so much, to go through so much death and devastation, to do that twice in less than half a lifetime and have nothing at all to show for it... was the lot of Germany. How might things have turned out worse? He couldn’t begin to imagine.

“We managed not to lose last year,” Zgomot said. “Then, Bottero started late in the campaigning season. He will not make the same mistake twice - say what you will about the Lenelli, but they do not make the same mistake twice in a row. That is my people’s failing, I fear. Our imaginations spin more slowly than theirs.”