After the Downfall (7 page)

Hasso would have been interested to hear what dogs had to say, too. All the same ... “Bottero’s hounds won’t plot to murder you in your bed one fine night.” He knew the risk of keeping Russian servants on the Eastern Front. Some Germans got by with it. A lot of Russians hated Stalin worse than Hitler. But Hasso had never been tempted. It would have been just his luck to draw somebody who was playacting. King Bottero laughed when the wizard told him what the German’s words meant. “These are also my dogs,” the king said, waving toward the Grenye. “They will not bite.”

He seemed very sure of himself, and of his servants. Hasso glanced at the Grenye again. They went about their work with their heads down, and seemed to pay little more heed to the Lenelli than their masters did to them. But a certain slight stiffness in the way they moved made Hasso sure they understood Lenello, even if the Lenelli didn’t bother to understand them.

“Goddess on earth?” Hasso asked Velona, the Lenello words strange in his mouth. They lay side by side on the bed of his small chamber in Castle Drammen. No matter what Velona was, he was only a new vassal of ambiguous rank. Chances were he got a chamber of his own only because she fancied him. Otherwise, he would have drawn a cot or a straw pallet in the common room with the belching, farting, snoring ordinary soldiers.

He wouldn’t have minded. He’d done that often enough. But this was much, much better. The bed was small, too, which meant he and Velona touched even when they lay side by side. The tip of her breast just brushed the skin of his arm. She smelled of clean sweat and cinnamon. If she was a goddess, she was a very human one.

She nodded, which made shadows swoop across the promontories of her face. The only light in the room came from a lamp that sputtered and added the odor of hot mutton fat to the air. “That’s right,” she said.

“What does it mean?” Hasso asked the question a dozen times a day.

Velona looked surprised when he asked now. “What it says, of course.”

“What is that?” Things Hasso wanted to say bubbled up inside him: how in his world there were no goddesses on earth, or even gods; how God Himself seemed far away, if He was there at all; how the age of miracles, or the age when people believed in miracles, was long gone. And yet a little miracle, or something a hell of a lot like one, had brought him here from burning Berlin. But even if the
Führer
was as close to a god on earth as people knew in these grimly rational days, it would have taken more than a little miracle to save the
Reich
from the clutches of the Russian bear, the American eagle, and the British lion.

Speaking German, all that would have burst free in a torrent of words. In Lenello, he was limited to questions that made him sound like a
Dummkopf.
Sooner or later, he would understand more. He’d been through enough to teach him patience the hard way.

“You really don’t know.” Velona sounded amazed.

“I really don’t know.” Hasso hoped he got the conjugation right.

She laughed - not at him, he didn’t think. “The goddess lives in me,” she said, touching the inside of her left breast to show what she meant. “Sometimes I am Velona, sometimes I am the goddess, sometimes I am the goddess and Velona at the same time.” She spoke slowly and simply to give him a chance to understand.

“How to know - how I to know - which?” he asked.

He wondered if she would laugh again, but she didn’t. “When I ran out of Bucovin, the goddess filled me. I could not have run like that if she hadn’t. Those Grenye you saw chasing me, those weren’t the first ones who came after me. I left the others in the dust.”

“I understand,” he said after a bit. Her explanation wasn’t smooth. She backed and filled and used different words and gestured and sat up in bed and acted out what she meant. He never got tired of watching her. Goddess or Velona, she was the most
alive
person he’d ever met, and it wasn’t even close.

“Good!” Her eyes flashed brighter than the feeble rays from that smelly mutton - fat lamp should have let them do. “But even the goddess fills only a woman. Those churls would have caught me if you hadn’t - “

She imitated the noise from the Schmeisser again. She kissed him. “Thank you.”

“Happy. Glad.” Hasso drew her to him. “Big glad!” She laughed. Then he asked, “Make love with goddess? Or make love with Velona?”

“Oh, that was me,” she said, and pointed at herself to make sure he got it. “The goddess went out of me when I didn’t need her any more. That was one reason I was so worn there for a little while.” Again, she worked at what she was saying till she was sure he followed. She was a good teacher ... and learning a language from a lover had incentives a tutor with a mustache and a tweed jacket couldn’t hope to match. If the goddess possessed her some of the time, what was it like when possession ended? In his own world, he would have taken her talk for metaphor. Here? He kept an open mind. He’d seen enough strange things to make him unsure where metaphor left off and magic began. And if magic worked, why couldn’t there be a literal goddess?

No reason he could see, no reason at all.

“What about with King Bottero?” he asked. He hoped he didn’t sound too jealous. He didn’t feel
too
jealous, but he wasn’t altogether easy about it.

“Oh, with him I am the goddess and me both,” Velona answered matter-of-factly. “The seasons need renewing, and this is how we do it. And he is a man, and I am a woman, and that is how men and women do it. You ought to know.” She poked him in the ribs.

“Well, yes,” he said. She made it sound so reasonable. The only thing wrong was that what happened between men and women
wasn’t
reasonable. No matter how people tried, they couldn’t make it reasonable, either. They couldn’t in the world he came from, anyhow. He didn’t think the Lenelli and Grenye were much different.

Velona laughed. “In fact...” she said. Sure enough, he’d just bumped her belly. They started all over again. He hadn’t thought a man his age could perform the way he did. But then, he hadn’t had inspiration like this, either.

Afterwards, he wished for a cigarette. Even the ones the German quartermasters doled out, that tasted of hay and horseshit instead of honest tobacco, would have been better than nothing. But he’d had them in the back pocket of his trousers when he landed in the swamp here, and they got ruined. Too damn bad.

“Is it better now?” Velona might have been soothing a little boy. Her methods were different - were they ever! - but not her tone.

“Well, yes,” Hasso said again. And it was, too, and it would stay that way till the summer solstice, or till he thought about the summer solstice, or till he ran into King Bottero, or for a little while, anyhow. What could he do about it, any which way? Tell the goddess not to do what the goddess did? Velona would laugh in his face. He’d be lucky if Bottero only laughed. He could go from vassal to victim in the time the king took to snap his fingers.

And so...
And so what?
he wondered. If he couldn’t stand the idea, the only thing he could do was break off with Velona. The king would still keep him around, as a soldier, as an unarmed - combat instructor, and maybe in the hope that he could teach the Lenelli to make firearms. They wouldn’t turn out Schmeissers any time in the next few hundred years. If he could make black powder, though, they might manage cannons and matchlock muskets. And cannons ought to be plenty to win him a field marshal’s baton, or whatever they used here instead of one.

So he could make his way here without Velona if he wanted to. He thought so, anyhow. But did he want to? If he did, he figured he needed to check his brain for working parts. If she had to do what a goddess had to do, he figured he could live through it.

“It’ll be all right,” he told himself.

“What?” Velona asked, and he realized he’d spoken not only out loud but in German.

“All good,” he said in Lenello, and hoped he meant it.

The master-at-arms at Castle Drammen was a fellow named Orosei. He wasn’t particularly big for a Lenello - only a couple of centimeters taller than Hasso - but he was in perfect shape. As they faced each other in the courtyard, stripped to the waist, the German could see as much. He wasn’t bad himself, but Orosei had not a gram of fat and muscles like steel bands.

Soldiers watched the faceoff. Hasso was starting to understand bits of Lenello. They figured he was crazy - nobody in his right mind messed with Orosei. Eyeing his opponent, Hasso thought they had a point.

He’d done this at Castle Svarag, but Orosei looked like a much rougher customer than Sholseth or his buddies. This guy didn’t just have muscle. He had technique, too. Hasso could see that at a glance.

“So you know tricks, do you?” Orosei said. His gaze went here, there, everywhere. He wouldn’t give himself away by eyeing his target before he went after it.

Hasso shrugged. “Maybe a few.”

“Well, let’s get on with it,” Orosei said. “Nothing personal, you understand.”
I make my living
squashing people. You’re just another one.

“Nothing personal,” Hasso agreed.
If I can beat you, I look like a big deal. You’re in the way
-
like
Poland.

They circled warily. Hasso took it on faith that Orosei was good. The master-at-arms didn’t seem inclined to take chances on anybody. Once things started happening, fights could - often did - end in seconds. Someone would make a mistake or just move an instant slower than he should have, and that would be that.

“Did you come here to fight or to dance?” Orosei asked. In the middle of the question, without warning or even raising his voice, he sprang.

The next few seconds were one of those frantic flurries that happened when two pros went at each other without any rules. One of Orosei’s boots thudded into Hasso’s chest - not quite in his solar plexus and not quite hard enough to break ribs. The Lenello’s thumb didn’t quite take out Hasso’s left eye, either and Hasso didn’t think he quite broke it when he bent it back. He got in some licks of his own, too. They broke apart again. Orosei would sport a mouse under one eye, and he definitely had hurt that hand. He saluted Hasso Lenello - style, clenched fist over his heart. “You’re good, all right,” he said.

“We can use you.”

“You are good, too.” Hasso didn’t like plodding through a language he barely spoke, but he had no choice.

They circled some more. Hasso fired a kick at Orosei’s knee. Orosei grabbed his foot and launched him, then jumped on him like a starving tiger. But Hasso had expected to get thrown, and greeted him with a boot in the belly. It was like kicking planks, but it got the master-at-arms off him. Orosei bounced to his feet. He saluted again, saying, “You’re
bloody
good. Show me those flips I’ve heard about.”

“We go slow?” Hasso asked, and the master-at-arms nodded. Hasso knew a moment’s relief that he’d proved himself without getting maimed and without wrecking the other guy, who was bound to have friends in high places. He said, “Come at me - not very fast.”

Orosei did. He made a perfect practice partner. Hasso grabbed his outthrust arm, twisted, got him on his hip, and flipped him over his shoulder. Orosei thudded down on his back with a big grin on his face. He sprang up. “That’s good, by the goddess! Do it again!”

Hasso sent him ass over teakettle a couple of more times at half speed, and then at something closer to full speed. Orosei was a glutton for getting things right. If he took some bruises doing it, he didn’t care.

“Let me try,” he said when he thought he had it.

“Half speed,” Hasso said, and the master-at-arms nodded. Hasso approached. He extended his arm. Orosei twisted and flipped him smooth as could be. Hasso hadn’t expected anything different - this guy
was
a pro.

He proved what a pro he was a moment later. After he’d tossed Hasso around three or four times, he said, “That is the move, and it’s very fine. What is the counter?”

“Ah!” Now Hasso gave him a German - style salute. “Good question! Right question! I come half speed. You - “ He mimed doing the flip. “You see.”

Some of the soldiers drifted off when they found that Hasso and Orosei weren’t going to ruin each other for their entertainment. Others crowded closer to watch Hasso show the master-at-arms how not to get thrown. A lot of them wanted to try the moves themselves, on one another and on the men who really knew how to do them.

“You’re better than I am,” Orosei said after a while. “I have to think about it, and you just do it.”

“Practice,” Hasso said with another shrug. How many times had he done those flips? On the other hand... “Me and sword? Bad.” He made a face to show how bad.

“But you’ve got that fire-spitting pellet crossbow,” Orosei said: a pretty good description of a Schmeisser from somebody who’d never heard of the Industrial Revolution. “Do all the soldiers where you come from carry those?” Orosei asked. When Hasso nodded, the master-at-arms winced. “You must kill each other before you get close enough for swords.”

“Mostly.” Hasso nodded again. Orosei wasn’t just a hardnose with quick reflexes. He had brains. That figured. He was more or less a regimental sergeant major, so he’d better not be a dummy - especially right under the king’s eye.

The Lenello tossed him a spearshaft with a bundle of rags at the end instead of a point. “You know what to do with this?”

“Some,” Hasso answered.

“Let’s see.” Orosei took a practice pike, too, and did his best to stick Hasso like a pig. When Hasso showed he could handle himself, Orosei whacked him on the back. “Yeah, you’re pretty decent. How come, when you don’t know what to do with a blade?”

As best Hasso could, he explained about bayonets. Then he said, “Wait, please,” and hurried back to his chamber. He returned with his entrenching tool. “Fight with this, too.” He demonstrated some of the unkind things you could do with the metal blade.

Orosei watched with interest, then hefted the entrenching tool himself. “Nice little thing,” he said with an appreciative nod. “You dig holes so the pellets don’t dig holes in you?”

“Yes,” Hasso said. Orosei got it, all right.