One of his small, dark drinking buddies left as soon as Hasso and Aderno came far enough into the tavern to give him a clear path to the door. Hasso wondered who wanted him, and for what, and how badly. But that was a question for another day. He went up to the Grenye behind the counter — Negustor himself? — set a small silver coin on the counter, and said, "Beer, please."
The tapman blinked. Had he ever heard please from a Lenello? Even from Scanno? Or from anyone at all? He made the coin disappear, then dipped up a mug, filling it quite full. "Here you go."
"Thanks." Hasso turned. "Want something, Aderno?"
To get out of here. Every line of Aderno shouted it. But the wizard just said, "Wine." He set down a coin, too. The tapman took it and gave him a smaller mug. Aderno tasted, made a sour face, and sighed.
Hasso dug out another coin. He pointed to Scanno. "One for him, too, please."
"He needs more beer like a drowning man needs a boulder," the tapman said, but he dipped out one more mug.
Hasso took it and carried it over to Scanno's table. "Here," he said, setting it down in front of the Lenello. "Join you?"
"Hang on." Scanno drained the mug he already had. Then he patted the stool to his left that that Grenye had hastily vacated. "Anybeery who buys me bod's a friend of mine." He frowned, knowing that wasn't right, but fixing it seemed too much trouble.
Aderno, disapproval sticking out of him like a porcupine's quills, perched gingerly on another stool. The Grenye next to whom he sat down upended his mug and also made a quick exit. The one on Hasso's left stayed where he was. Innocent? Curious? Dangerous? I'll find out, Hasso thought.
Scanno's eyes had as many red tracks as a railroad map of the Reich. God only knew when he'd last combed his beard. He stank of sweat, alcohol, and stale hops. "Well, friend, waddaya want?" he asked, slurring his words so Hasso could barely understand him. "You out slumming?"
"We want to talk to you," Hasso answered.
Scanno took a pull from the fresh mug of beer. "Piss in the river." He eyed Hasso, blinking blearily. No matter how bleary he was, his ears still worked. "You're no Lenello," he said. "I've heard plenty of Grenye who talk our lingo better'n you. Who are you? Where are you from?"
"My name is Hasso Pemsel." And now you know as much as you did before. "I am from a different world. Magic. I am in King Bottero's service now."
That might have been the funniest thing Scanno ever heard. He laughed till tears ran down his cheeks and into his matted beard. "You came from another world and you couldn't do any better'n joining up with Buttfart? The goddess must hate you bad, pal."
Aderno audibly ground his teeth. Hasso kicked him in the ankle under the table. He said, "The goddess does not hate me." There, at least, he could be positive. Then he asked, "What is better than to serve the king?"
"Anything short of an arrow in the ass," Scanno answered. That was plenty for the last Grenye at the table, who got out while the getting was good. Scanno went on, "I mean, look at me." He jabbed a thumb at his chest. "I serve myself, nobody else. I'm better off than your shadow here any day of the month, 'cause I'm free."
"Your so-called freedom is a recommendation for slavery," Aderno said icily.
"Hush," Hasso told him. The wizard looked not only affronted but alarmed. Was he wondering whether Hasso was about to join the forces of drunken lawlessness? It looked that way to the German.
He'd succeeded in surprising Scanno, too. "What's with you?" the renegade said. "You look like a Lenello, but you sure don't act like one."
"Is better to act like Grenye?" Hasso asked. That made Aderno perk up, deciding Hasso likely was on King Bottero's side after all.
And Scanno, drunk and hoping he'd found a friend, wasn't on his guard. "You're cursed well right it is," he said. "Would I be here if it wasn't?" He drained the mug Hasso had bought him. Hasso signaled to the tapman, who carried over another one. Scanno would have a head that pounded like a drop-forging plant when he came down from this bender, but that was his worry.
He seemed to think the fresh beer had got there of its own accord. "What do you have against your own folk?" Hasso asked him.
"Waddaya think?" Scanno said. Since Hasso had no idea, he kept quiet and waited. Scanno got to his feet and staggered over to a corner, his gait like a ship at full sail on a rough sea. After easing himself, he lurched back. For a wonder, he remembered where he'd been going before the interruption: "Ever watch a twelve-year-old steal a ripe pear from a kid half his size?"
"I know what you mean," Hasso said. And he did. The image held a lot of truth. Aderno looked as if he were about to burst. Hasso kicked him under the table again. Aderno's idea of gathering intelligence was tearing what you wanted to know out of whoever had it. Teasing it out seemed beyond his mental horizon.
"Well, that's what we're doing here," Scanno said. "By the goddess, it is! I couldn't stand it anymore, so I said a plague on it — and here I am."
"What about Bucovin?" Hasso said. "Bucovin not so small. Not so…" He looked for a word, and was glad to find one without needing help from the wizard: "Not so easy."
"Bucovin had time to figure things out, see?" Scanno said. "The little Grenye kingdoms, the ones by the sea, they went down bam, bam, bam like nobody's business. They never knew what hit 'em. But Bucovin watched and started figuring stuff out."
"Like what?" Hasso asked. "Bucovin full of Grenye. No magic in Bucovin. How to fight against Lenello wizards?"
"Magic? Magic — " Scanno spat on the straw-strewn dirt floor. "That for magic! That's about what it's worth."
"Shall I sing you up a case of boils, wretch?" No, Aderno wouldn't keep his mouth shut even when he needed to. "Shall I show you what magic's worth?"
"You've got emerods on your tongue, Turdface," Scanno said. Hasso had spent enough time in Lenello barracks to have no trouble with the insult. Scanno aimed a shaky finger in Aderno's direction. "I knew what you were before you started bragging. I could smell it, I could. Do your worst. You're not such a big pile of shit as you think you are."
Holding Aderno back after that would have been impossible. Hasso didn't even try. The wizard snarled his spell — plainly one he knew well — rather than singing it. "Skin break, skin bubble, skin burn!" he cried, and aimed his finger the way Hasso would have aimed his Schmeisser: with purpose and with malice. "Transform! Transform! Transform!"
And nothing happened.
Aderno stared at Scanno, who was drunk and surly but not disfigured. He stared at his finger as Hasso would have stared at the submachine gun after a misfire. Hasso could hope to clear a jam. What did you do when magic misfired?
The first thing Aderno did was try the spell he'd used on Hasso when they met in the courtyard of Castle Svarag. He sketched a star in the air between himself and Scanno. Hasso saw him do it, but didn't see the star glow on its own, as it had when the wizard did it with him.
Aderno did some more staring, this time at his own index finger. He tried the spell with Hasso, who saw the same golden star he had before. After Aderno made sure he had, the wizard shook his head. "The magic seems to be in order. But — "
"It doesn't work," Hasso finished for him.
"It doesn't work," Aderno agreed. "And I don't know why not. This miserable sot has no magic, used no magic. And yet my spell would not bite. And I don't know why." A German engineer couldn't have sounded any more upset if he'd watched a book fall up instead of down.
"Told you so, know-it-all," Scanno jeered.
Lenello magic, from what Hasso had heard, grew weak and erratic in Bucovin. Scanno was right here, but Aderno's magic didn't want to work against him, either. What did that mean? Hasso had no idea. Plainly, neither did Aderno.
V
Aderno wanted to take Scanno back to Castle Drammen to experiment on him. The wizard didn't put it in quite those words, but that was what it boiled down to. Scanno, not surprisingly, didn't want to go. "You aren't going to play games with me," he said.
"It's for the goo
d of the Lenelli," Aderno said.
Scanno blew beer fumes in his face as he laughed. "Like I care!"
"Come on," Aderno said to Hasso. "We can get him there."
Hasso didn't feel like fighting a drunk who was unlikely even to notice if he got hurt. He also didn't want to wreck whatever chance they had of getting voluntary cooperation from Scanno. "Forget it," he said — in Lenello, so Scanno could follow. "We come back a different time."
"I wouldn't come back here for half the gold in the treasury!" the wizard exclaimed.
"Fine," Hasso said. 'I come back a different time."
"You're a peculiar one," Scanno said. "You belong with me, not with this tight-arsed twit."
"No." Hasso let it go there. He didn't want to tell the renegade that he'd killed Grenye. He didn't want to tell him he was sleeping with the goddess on earth, either. If Scanno asked around, he could hear it for himself. Hasso got to his feet. "Come on. We go."
The tapman gave him a polite nod as he left. He nodded back, which seemed to surprise the Grenye again.
Out on the street, Aderno lost his temper. "What do you think you're doing, taking that lout's side? Are you crazy? Are you a traitor, too?"
"Shut up," Hasso said in Lenello, an officer's snap in his voice. He went on in German, knowing the wizard would understand and the Grenye all around wouldn't: "Let him think I'm on his side, or I might be. Let him think that, and who knows how much we may learn from him? Get rough now, and we end up with nothing."
Aderno gaped. "Maybe you're playing your own game. Maybe you think all of us are children."
"You act like it sometimes." Hasso said that in Lenello. Aderno flushed, for he used the second-person singular, not plural.
A Grenye with a pheasant feather stuck in his cap said something about his nice, clean sister and pointed to the brothel across the street. Hasso shook his head. The Grenye didn't want to take no for an answer. He reached out to tug at Hasso's arm. Aderno said something too fast for the Wehrmacht officer to follow. The Grenye got it, though. He disappeared in a hurry.
"If our magic fails against the Grenye, how are we supposed to conquer Bucovin?" Aderno said.
"Maybe you do it one bite at a time," Hasso answered. "Maybe you go on to Falticeni and take it away from their king."
"Their chief, you mean," the Lenello said scornfully.
"Whatever he is." It didn't matter to Hasso. "Or maybe you decide it's too much trouble and you leave them alone. We had a big neighbor who we thought would be a pushover, too. That's why I was fighting in what was left of my own capital." If the Fuhrer had gone after England instead of trying to knock out Russia… Well, things could hardly have turned out worse.
"This whole land is ours. It is our destiny. If the savages don't bend the knee to us, we'll push them aside like the dirt they are." Aderno didn't care who was listening to him.
Sometimes disasters followed talk like that. Hasso had seen as much at first hand. But sometimes they didn't. The Americans hadn't worried about Indian raids for a lifetime. The aborigines in Australia had even less left to them than the redskins in the New World. Europeans ruled India and Africa. Conquest could work.
"Come on," Hasso said. "Let's get back to the castle."
Aderno went off to commune with a fellow wizard and try to figure out why his magic failed. Hasso thought about telling King Bottero what he'd done, but decided not to. This kingdom was tiny by the standards of the Reich, but not so tiny that the man at the top would want to hear every little detail. Chances were he'd listen politely — once. Hasso didn't care to burn up his credit like that.
He asked one of the guards where Velona was. The fellow shrugged, which made his mailshirt clink ever so slightly. "Don't know," he answered. Maybe he really didn't. Or maybe he didn't care for a jumped-up foreigner. His tone wasn't rude enough to be insubordinate.
Hasso asked the same thing of a Grenye maidservant carrying a heroic amount of laundry wrapped in a sheet. "She is in the chapel, my lord," the woman answered. Her Lenello was fluent, but flavored with an accent that said she'd be more at home in one of the swarthy natives' languages.
"Thank you very much," Hasso said. The maidservant looked as startled as the tapman at Negustor's had. Lenelli didn't waste much politeness on their social and political inferiors.
The chapel wasn't so fancy as its name suggested. Hasso heard it with Christian ears, which gave him expectations the Lenelli didn't have. The room was small and simple and spare. It had an altar with a low relief of the goddess carved into soft golden limestone. The lithe silhouette might have been taken from Velona's — except that the altar had crossed with early Lenello settlers.
But for the altar and a few stools, the chapel was bare. Maybe Christianity needed more in the way of display because, in Hasso's world, miracles were hard to come by. Here, with magic working and the goddess taking possession of her mortal acolyte, the impossible was as real as a punch in the nose.
Velona had prostrated herself before the altar. She didn't notice Hasso come in. Was that a faint radiance hovering around her? He wouldn't have sworn it wasn't, not after the way she seemed to glow as she strode naked toward Bottero on the night of the solstice. Hasso grimaced, not wanting to remember the rest of that night.
He wondered if he ought to cough, or if it would break some kind of spell. Erring on the side of caution, he stood and waited. After a couple of minutes, Velona stood up and turned toward him. When she did, her eyes flashed fire like a wild animal's. Human eyes didn't do that… except hers did. Hasso had no doubt of what he saw.
"Who disturbs the goddess?" The voice wasn't quite hers. It was deeper, more reverberant, as if it came from deep inside her — or maybe from far beyond her. Either way, the hair at the back of Hasso's neck wanted to stand on end. "Who dares?"
"I is sorry," he said, startled out of his grammar. He didn't care to admit, even to himself, that he was scared out of it.
She recognized his voice. He could tell the moment she did: it was the moment her aura died away. Suddenly she was just a woman, just his woman, again. "Oh. Hasso," she said, and her voice was the one he knew. "You… surprised me."
"Sorry," he said again, now certain to whom — and to what — he was apologizing. "Not mean to bother."
"It's all right. You didn't know any better. I was almost done communing anyhow." She made him feel like a kid who'd interrupted something very important that he wasn't big enough to understand. The more she pretended it was all right, the more certain he got that it wasn't. She tried to be brisk: "Well, you must have had a reason to come looking for me. What was it?"
In his halting Lenello, he told her about the curse Aderno had tried to drop on Scanno, how he'd failed, and how, despite failing, he'd seen that no magic protected the renegade. "I think you need to know this," he finished.
"Well, you're right," she said. "I do. Thank you. The goddess needs to know it, too." She kissed him. For a split second, the tingle that shot through him seemed even more than the high voltage Velona put into whatever she did. Imagination? In the world he came from, he would have thought so. Here? He had no way to know.
"What do you do about it?" he asked. "What does goddess do?"
She set a forefinger between her breasts. "I will take the word to the king. It marches too well with what happened to me when I went into Bucovin. One by one, my disguises and wards failed, but not for any reason I could find."
"The wizard tell — tells — he, too," Hasso said.
"No doubt. But Bottero will take it more seriously from me, because I am who I am and what I am," Velona said. "As for the goddess…" Hasso could see the deity come forth in her. Her eyes brightened and focused somewhere not of this world. Her hair spread and thickened till it reminded him of a lion's mane. She seemed altogether larger; though he still looked down at her, he felt as if she were peering down at him from a considerable height. She went on, "The goddess will deal with it in her own way." Then divinity disappeared, and she w
as Velona again.
What is the goddess' way? Hasso wondered. He didn't ask, though. He didn't have the nerve.
Her gaze sharpened in a merely human way. "If Aderno's spell won't bite on this wretch of a Scanno, what does that say? That he's in Bucovin's service, most likely. That he's a spy, a viper. You should have brought him here. Pins and pincers would tear the truth out of him even if magic failed."
If the Grenye in Bucovin couldn't find a better spy than a man busy drinking himself to death, they were in more trouble than they knew what to do with. But that thought led Hasso to another: "Can — how you say? — test Grenye? If magic works, ordinary, safe people. If magic does not work, maybe they have to do with Bucovin. Yes? No? Maybe?"
Velona thought about that. Her eyes glowed in an entirely human fashion. The way she showed she liked an idea was more drastic than he'd known from any other woman, to say nothing of more enjoyable. Was it sacrilege on a stool in the chapel? Not, he supposed, if your panting partner was a part-time goddess.
"What if someone comes in?" he asked afterwards, but only afterwards — he didn't worry about that, or anything else, while she straddled him.
She only laughed. "You ask the strangest questions. No one would come near the chapel while I was in it. No one but you, I mean, because you don't know our ways."
"Oh." How big a blunder had he made? A good thing she was fond of him, or even standing in the doorway might have been dangerous.
Velona had no trouble figuring out what he was thinking. "Don't worry about it. You told me things I needed to know. I did and the goddess did. Who knows? Maybe she even led you here."
Even though he'd begun to realize they didn't always fit in this world, Hasso clung to the rational, orderly patterns of thought he'd brought from the one that bred him. "How can she did that if she is here with you? If she is here in you?" he asked.
By the way Velona looked at him, the question had never occurred to her. The idea that there could be a question had never occurred to her. "She is the goddess. She can do anything she pleases," she said, as if stating an axiom of geometry.
After the downfall Page 8