After the downfall

by Harry Turtledove

  "Yes, your Majesty." Hasso could say that in Lenello. He would have meant it no matter what language he used. Then he eyed the king's roguish expression in a different way. Was he imagining things, or did Bottero sound as if he knew exactly what he was talking about?

  The Wehrmacht officer didn't see any polite way to ask the king. Maybe he would be able to find a polite way to ask Velona. Or maybe he didn't want to know.

  Then Bottero spoke again, and Hasso found out whether he wanted to or not. "His Majesty makes himself remember you are a foreigner, and so you are not used to our ways," Aderno said. He waited for Hasso to nod, then went on, "He will borrow the goddess for the coming summer solstice, as he does each solstice and equinox. No doubt, he says, you have some such customs in your own land."

  "No doubt," Hasso said tonelessly. He'd heard of pagan fertility rites, but he'd never dreamt they might matter to him. And what the hell was he supposed to say when the king told him, Hey, I'm going to borrow your girlfriend for a night? If he said, No, you're not, chances were he'd be shorter by a head. And if he said no to Velona, she was liable to laugh at him. If she was the goddess on earth, wasn't this part of her job requirement?

  "You don't say much," King Bottero observed through Aderno. He might be the size of a draft horse, but he was no dummy.

  "What am I supposed to say?" Hasso made himself shrug. "If it doesn't bother Velona, how can I squawk?"

  Bottero laughed when he heard that. "I knew you were a sensible fellow," he said, and gave Hasso a slap on the back that almost knocked him sprawling. "When you get right down to it, the women do the deciding."

  "Ja," Hasso agreed with a crooked smile. Pagan fertility rites or not, this world and the one he'd escaped weren't so very different. He turned to Aderno. "If I take service here, I know whose service I'm joining. Who's on the other side?"

  "A wise question. You should always know your foes at least as well as your friends," the wizard said. The Wehrmacht officer grunted. Hitler should have thought about that before he got into a war against both the USA and the USSR. If the Fuhrer had, Hasso wouldn't have been standing here right now. Aderno went on, "You would serve his Majesty against the other Lenello kingdoms, except the ones that are allies."

  Hasso nodded. "That makes sense."

  But Aderno wasn't done. "And you would serve him in ensuring that the Grenye in his kingdom know their place — know it and keep it."

  "Fair enough." If you were going to rule people you'd conquered, they had to respect you. Hasso had seen that in Russia. Let them think they were as good as you were and there'd be hell to pay. The Germans had paid it, too.

  "And" — now Aderno seemed like someone holding his nose against a bad smell that wouldn't go away — "there is Bucovin." When King Bottero heard the name, he made a horrible face, too.

  "Bucovin?" Hasso echoed, as he was no doubt meant to do.

  "The heart of the Grenye infection," Aderno said grimly. He pointed. "It lies to the east."

  Bottero spoke. "His Majesty says the Grenye lie all the time, and from any direction."

  "Heh," Hasso said. How close to the border was Castle Svarag? Had Velona been escaping from Bucovin? If she had, why didn't the people on her heels carry anything better than peasant weapons? All kinds of interesting questions. But a bigger one occurred to Hasso: "You have magic and the Grenye don't?"

  "Certainly." Aderno drew himself up like an affronted cat. "We are Lenelli, after all, and they are only Grenye." When the wizard translated the question for the king, Bottero's big head bobbed up and down.

  "Right," Hasso said. He hoped the sarcasm wouldn't make it through the translation spell. To try to blunt it if it did, he went on, "What I don't understand is, if you can work magic and they can't, why didn't you beat them a long time ago?" He thought of the conquistadors with their guns and horses and dogs and iron armor, and of the Indians who'd gone down in windrows before them.

  Again, Aderno turned the question into Lenello for his king. "We're getting there," Bottero said. "Our ships only found this land two centuries ago. We've pushed the savages back a long way from the sea. But Bucovin… Bucovin is difficult." He nodded again, seeming pleased he'd found the right word.

  Hitler would have said that about the Russians in 1942. And he would have been right — much righter than he knew then, in fact. The Reich and the Russians were both behind Hasso forever now. So I'm in the New World, am I? he thought. Bottero didn't look a bit like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and probably nothing like what's-his-name, Roosevelt's replacement, either.

  None of that brainfuzz mattered a pfennig's worth to the Lenelli. "Difficult how?" Hasso asked, as any soldier might. Aderno didn't look happy about translating the question. King Bottero didn't look happy about answering it, either. He bit off some harsh-sounding words. "When we attacked the Grenye there, we had a couple of armies come to grief." Aderno echoed what the king said so Hasso could understand. "We don't know exactly why."

  "Did they somehow learn magic on their own?" Hasso thought about Indians learning to ride horses and shoot guns.

  But the wizard shook his head. After he translated the question, so did the king. This time, Aderno showed no hesitation in answering on his own: "It is not possible. They are Grenye, and mindblind. There are no wizards among them. There never have been. There never will be. There never can be."

  Slavs are Untermenschen. All we have to do is hit them a good lick and they'll fall over, went through the German's mind. How much baggage he brought from the world he'd fled! Would he ever escape it? How could he? It made him what he was.

  Something he'd seen in this world occurred to him. "When we rode into Drammen, do you remember that drunken Lenello with the Grenye girlfriend we saw?"

  By Aderno's expression, he might have stuck pins under the wizard's fingernails. Very unwillingly, Aderno nodded. Even more unwillingly, he said, "I remember." The king barked a question. Most unwillingly of all, Aderno translated Hasso's question. What Bottero said after that should have scorched paint off the walls. When the king ran down, Aderno found a question of his own: "Why do you ask?" In contrast to his sovereign's words, his might have been carved off a glacier.

  "I was wondering whether some Lenello renegade might have made magic for Bucovin if the Grenye couldn't do it on their own," Hasso said.

  Again, King Bottero had to ask his wizard for a translation. When he got one, he did some more cursing, but then shook his head and answered the question. "There was no magic used against us," he said flatly. "None. We failed anyhow, failed twice, failed badly. Our own magic faltered there. Other Lenello kingdoms have failed, too. Bucovin is… difficult. We have not sent an army there for a while. Maybe we will try again before too long — there has been talk of it. But we will be wary if we do."

  "I see." Hasso wasn't sure he did. Plainly, though, the Lenelli didn't see what had gone wrong against the… difficult Bucovin, either.

  Bottero gave him a crooked grin. "Now that you know my realm's old shame, outlander, will you still take service with me against my enemies, whoever they may be?"

  What would the king and the wizard do if he said no? They'd throw him out on his ear, that was what. And so would Velona, and he'd deserve it. What would happen to him them? Would he end up a drunken stumblebum in the Grenye part of town?

  He hadn't crossed worlds for that. He gave Bottero his own salute, arm thrust out ahead of him. "Yes, your Majesty!"

  The ritual that followed came straight from the Middle Ages. Following Aderno's instructions, Hasso dropped to both knees again and held out his hands clasped together. King Bottero enfolded them in his own big mitts. "I am your man," Hasso said, prompted by Aderno. "I pledge you my full faith against all men who may live and die, so help me God." A Lenello would have sworn by the goddess, he supposed. He wondered if Aderno would correct him, but the wizard let it go.

  Bottero hauled him to his feet with effortless ease. The king wasn't just a big man; he was strong, too. He leaned
forward and kissed Hasso on both cheeks. They were big, smacking kisses, the kind a Russian might have given — no French sophistication here.

  "You are my man. I accept your homage. By the goddess, I will do nothing to make myself not deserve it," Bottero said through the wizard. "I welcome you to my service."

  "Thank you, your Majesty." Hasso felt better because of the oath he'd sworn. Now he had a real place here. He belonged. He didn't know all of what that place entailed yet, but he could find out. He wasn't just somebody who'd fallen from nowhere. He was one of King Bottero's men. All the Lenelli would understand that. So would the Grenye.

  A couple of small, dark servants came into the throne room. They started sweeping and dusting. None of the Lenelli paid any attention to them; they might have been part of the furniture. As they worked, they chattered in low voices in a croaking, guttural language that sounded nothing like Lenello.

  "What are they saying?" Hasso asked Aderno.

  The wizard shrugged. "I have no idea. It could only matter to another Grenye."

  "Doesn't your translation spell work on their language?" Hasso couldn't imagine why it wouldn't. Why have a translation spell if you weren't going to use it to understand a tongue you didn't speak?

  "It would," Aderno said with the air of a man making a great concession. "But why would I care to listen to Grenye grunting? I'd just as soon listen to what the king's hunting hounds had to say."

  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 Fuhrer 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 a
bout 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.