"Here." Rautat perched on a stool by an empty table. He waved Hasso to another one. A couple of the German's watchdogs also sat down. The rest hovered over him. Like the rest of the men in here, they probably would have been happier to kill him than to guard him. But they followed orders. If they intimidated him while he drank, chances were they didn't mind.
A barmaid brought the beers. She smiled at Rautat and looked at Hasso… yes, as if he were a tiger out of its cage. The rest of the guards ordered beer, too, except for one who chose mead instead. The barmaid seemed glad to get away.
"To your health," Rautat said to Hasso, raising his mug.
"To your health," Hasso echoed, returning the gesture. They both drank. The beer was better than what they'd given him in his cell, but not much. To somebody used to good German beer, what the Lenelli and the Bucovinans made mostly tasted like sour horsepiss. You could drink it if you had to, though, so he did. Drink water here, as in Russia, and you begged for dysentery.
Why didn't the damn wizards do something about that? Hasso's guess was that if they tried they'd be too busy to do anything else.
One of the soldiers already in the tavern came up to Hasso and unloaded a torrent of gibberish on him. "Sorry, not understand," he said, and then, to Rautat, "What does he say?"
"Nothing you want to hear," the underofficer answered in Lenello. "What a rotten dog you are and how he'd like to carve chunks off your liver and eat them raw."
"Tell him I'm insulted," Hasso said in the same language. "Tell him the least he could do is cook them first."
Rautat translated that. Hasso wondered whether he would get a laugh or start a fight. He outweighed the native by close to thirty kilos, so brawling didn't seem fair. But he didn't intend to let the Bucovinan pound on him without hitting back.
The soldier stared at Rautat, then stared at him. "He said that?" the man said; Hasso had no trouble at all following him. Then the fellow started to chuckle, and he said something the Wehrmacht officer didn't understand before going back to his own table.
"What was that?" Hasso asked Rautat.
In Lenello, Rautat answered, "He said you may be a big blond bastard, but you may almost be a human being, too."
"Thank you," Hasso said, deadpan, putting the polite particle at the end. Rautat broke up. Hasso took another pull at his mug of beer. The Grenye were recognizable human beings, too, even if they couldn't work magic — maybe especially because they couldn't.
When Rautat and the rest of the guards brought Hasso back to the palace, he got a surprise. While he was gone, the servants had cleaned up his cell and taken out the nasty straw pallet, replacing it with a wool-stuffed mattress on a wooden frame with leather lashings. They'd given him a stool and a basin and pitcher — and a brazier, to fight the freezing breezes that howled in through the window. Now it was a real room — almost.
He bowed to Rautat. "Thank you," he said again, this time with the polite particle in front to show he was sincere.
"Don't — it wasn't my idea." Rautat repeated himself till Hasso understood, then added, "If you want to thank anybody, thank the priestess. She's in charge of stuff like this." Again, he doubled back till the German got it.
"I do that," Hasso said.
He didn't get a chance till late in the afternoon. He spent some of the time in between asleep on the nice, new mattress. All too soon, it would be full of bugs, as the old one had been. He didn't like that, but after more than five years of war in Europe he didn't think it was the end of the world, either. He'd been lousy and fleabitten and bedbug-bedeviled before. You itched, you scratched, you killed what you could, and you got on with your life.
When Drepteaza came in — accompanied, as usual, by tough little Bucovinan guards — he bowed lower to her than he had to Rautat. "I thank you," he said, the polite particle properly in front, and waved to show why he was thanking her.
The native soldiers laughed at him. Drepteaza smiled, "You say, 'I thank you'" she told him, using the feminine form of the pronoun. Hasso swore in German, which made him feel better and didn't offend anybody here, and thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. Too goddamn much stuff to remember! Drepteaza went on, "And I say that you are welcome. You will be here a while. You may as well be comfortable."
He doubted he would ever be comfortable in this world. The twentieth century had too much that simply didn't exist here. Electricity, hot and cold running water, refrigeration, glazed windows, phonographs and photographs, radios, cars… But, again, he'd done without most of that stuff for years. You didn't have to have it, the way so many people thought you did. Life was nicer with it, sure, but you could manage without.
"And you'll earn these things," the priestess said. "We do expect to learn from you, you know." She repeated herself in Lenello so he could have no doubt about what she meant.
"I understand," he answered, which wasn't the same as promising to deliver. Whatever he gave the Bucovinans would hurt the Lenelli. The hope that he would give them things that would hurt the Lenelli was the only reason the natives hadn't murdered him instead of taking him prisoner.
Drepteaza eyed him shrewdly. "You understand, but you don't want to do it. Plenty of real Lenelli do, and you aren't one."
You're just as foreign there as you are here, so why not help us? That was what she meant, all right. She wasn't quite right, though. Hasso felt more at home among the Lenelli than he did here, and he doubted things would have been different had he landed here first. The Lenelli came closer to thinking the way he did. They were conquerors. They were winners. Bucovin was a land trying to figure out how not to lose. It wasn't the same.
He couldn't say that to Drepteaza without insulting her. So he said something simpler: "I swear — swore — an oath to King Bottero."
"I've heard about it." The swarthy little priestess looked at him. "How much would your oath matter if you weren't sleeping with that blond cow?"
"Velona's no cow!" Hasso exclaimed: the first thought that sprang into his head. You could call her all kinds of things, but cow? If you called her a cow, you'd never met her and you had no notion, no notion at all, what she was like.
Drepteaza gave him the native equivalent of a curtsy; it looked more like a dance step. "Excuse me," she said with wintry politeness. "That blond serpent, should I call her? That blond wolf-bitch?"
Those both came closer. Still, Hasso said, "I don't insult you or your folk."
This time, Drepteaza looked through him. "The Lenelli are not your folk. You said so yourself."
And he had, again and again. "But — " he began.
"But what?" The priestess sounded genuinely confused. Then her eyes widened. She said something in Bucovinan that he didn't get. She must have seen he didn't, for she went back to Lenello: "You really love her!" She couldn't have seemed more appalled had she accused him of breakfasting on Grenye babies.
He remembered that Velona had sounded just as horrified herself when she realized the same thing. "Well, what if I do?" he said roughly, doing his best to forget that.
"Moths fly into torch flames because they must. Do they love them when they do?" Drepteaza said — the exact figure Velona had used.
Hasso's ears heated. "I don't know. I'm not a moth," he said.
"No, you're not, which only makes it worse. You have a choice, and you choose to be a fool," Drepteaza told him.
The more she argued with him, the more she put his back up. "What am I supposed to do? Tell my heart no?" he asked.
"You would if you had any sense. If you had any sense — " Drepteaza broke off and threw her hands in the air. "Oh, what's the use? If you could show a fool his folly, he wouldn't be a fool anymore." She turned and spoke to the guards in Bucovinan: "Come on. It's hopeless. He's hopeless."
Hasso understood that just fine. Yes, she was a good teacher. She just didn't want to teach him anymore. The closing door and the thud of the bar on the outside falling back into place had a dreadfully final sound.
H
e wondered whether the Bucovinans would take away his small comforts again and remind him he was a prisoner. For that matter, he wondered whether he would find out how ingenious the local torturer was. If you told your captors things they didn't want to hear, you had to expect to pay the price.
Drepteaza really hadn't wanted to hear that he loved Velona. For that matter, neither had Velona. It would have been funny if it hadn't put his ass in a sling. Hell, it was pretty funny anyhow.
They went on feeding him, and the food stayed better than the prison slop he'd had before. Somebody — maybe Drepteaza, maybe Lord Zgomot, maybe just Rautat — was in a merciful mood, at least as far as that went. Not expecting any mercies, Hasso was grateful even for small ones.
He spent the next several days wondering whether small ones were the only ones he'd get. The natives who brought him food didn't speak to him, and didn't answer when he tried to speak to them. Neither did the ones who emptied his chamber pot.
And nobody else showed up. Drepteaza didn't come in to teach him more Bucovinan. Rautat didn't come in with guards to escort him around Falticeni. They let him stew in his own juices instead.
I'm not going to stop feeling what I feel about Velona, he thought. I'm not going to forget my oath to Bottero. Some more time went by. I hope I'm not, anyway.
He did what he'd done before: he slept as much as he could. The long, cold winter nights lent themselves to that. To sleep, perchance to dream… If he wasn't too hungry and he wasn't too cold, why not? He couldn't turn on the radio or even curl up with a good book.
At first, he didn't dream much, or didn't remember what he dreamt if he did. He'd never paid a whole lot of attention to his dreams, so that didn't worry him. And even if he had been, the clout in the head he'd taken might have scrambled his brains worse than he knew.
When he did start noticing what he dreamt, that was enough to make him sit up and wonder what the hell was going on. All the dreams had the same theme: somebody was looking for him, trying to talk to him. He had no idea who or why. The dreams didn't seem threatening. That was as much as he was willing to say about them, even to himself.
When, after a couple of weeks, Drepteaza did start giving him lessons again, he mentioned them to her. He tried first in his very basic, very bad Bucovinan. When that failed, he switched to Lenello. She heard him out with her usual thoughtful air. Once he finished, she said, "I will pray, and see if that does anything."
It didn't, not as far as Hasso could tell. She listened gravely when he told her so, then promised to speak to Rautat about it. The veteran underofficer came up to Hasso and winked at him. "I know what you need," he said.
"Do you?" Hasso said. "I don't." Rautat thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard.
Hasso found out why a couple of nights later, when a reasonably good-looking Bucovinan woman came into his room without any guards escorting her. "My name is Leneshul," she said in fair Lenello. "They say you have been without pleasure too long. I can give you some." As matter-of-factly as if she were going to wash dishes, she pulled her top off over her head and tugged her skirt and drawers down to the floor. "Do I suit you?" she asked, standing naked — and she was naked, not nude — before him. "You can have someone else if I don't."
Part of him wanted to tell her to leave and not to ask anyone else to come in her place. But he was almost painfully aware of how very long he'd gone without. It didn't have to mean anything — just relief and, as she'd said, some momentary pleasure. "You'll do," he told her, and got out of his own clothes.
He wasn't sure she enjoyed it, but he wasn't sure she didn't. She was certainly limber and uninhibited. He rode her the first time. After they finished, she sucked him hard again and straddled him. He squeezed her small, firm breasts as she bucked up and down. She threw back her head and groaned. If she came, it was right then. He knew he did a moment later.
"There," she said, leaning down to brush her lips across his. "Is that better?"
"Oh, yes," he said. She laughed throatily.
He slept without dreams that night. Drepteaza asked him about it at their language lesson the next morning. She seemed pleased at his answer. "Rautat was clever," she said. "More clever than I was. You may have Leneshul any night you please — or another woman, if you'd rather."
What about you? Hasso wondered. Drepteaza was cool, almost cold, as if she had no idea how pretty she was. That made the prospect of heating her all the more exciting. But she looked at him as if he were a side of beef. If he offended her, she could do anything she wanted to him. He kept his big mouth shut… about that, anyway.
"Leneshul is all right," he told her.
"Then she will come to you again," Drepteaza said briskly. And Leneshul did, two or three nights a week. On those nights, Hasso never had any of the dreams that disturbed him. He had them less often on other nights, too.
But when they did come on other nights, they seemed more urgent, as if whatever was behind them felt itself thwarted and so tried harder than ever to break through. That alarmed him; he felt pursued. He used the solace of Leneshul's compliant body as often as he could.
No matter what he did, he couldn't get it up every single night. He wished he were ten years younger; then he might have. But when he was ten years younger, the future stretched out before him with a broad and shining path. The Fuhrer was turning the tiny Reichswehr into the Wehrmacht, restoring German pride, restoring German power. What could stand in the way of a proud, resurgent nation?
Well, he'd found out what could, all right. And here he was in a strange world, older and more scarred and screwing his head off not for love or even lust but out of fear.
That helped wear him out, too. One night, he fell asleep right after supper. If Leneshul came to his room that evening, she quietly left again, and he never knew it. And so… he dreamt. And whatever had chased him for so long finally caught up with him.
"Hasso!" He heard his own name echoing, as if down a long, windy corridor. "Hasso Pemsel!"
He didn't want to answer. He didn't want to acknowledge. The harder he fled, though, the more his name pursued him. Names had power. So the wizards said, and here he was a wizard — of sorts.
At last, hounded, he stood and turned at bay. "What?" he shouted back into the void.
Time passed. A minute? An hour? It was a dream — he couldn't be sure. Time: that was all he knew. Then, dimly, a face appeared in the void, a face he knew. Aderno's face, he realized. "By the goddess, I've had a demon of a time raising you!" the wizard said.
When he named the goddess, Hasso seemed to see the cult statue floating beside him. The German also seemed to see Velona's face instead, or perhaps as well. He had trouble being sure which, but what difference did it make? It was only a dream… wasn't it? "Well, here I am," Hasso said.
Aderno nodded. "We heard you'd lived," he said. "We weren't sure, but it seems to be true. That was why Bottero tried to ransom you."
"Yes, I'm still around. They take me to Falticeni," Hasso said. Even in a dream, he stuck to the present tense as much as he could when speaking Lenello.
"You're not — telling them anything, are you?" Aderno sounded more anxious than perhaps he thought he did. Maybe covering up was harder in a dream. Or was Aderno dreaming? So much Hasso didn't know.
"No, I don't say anything," he replied. "You are well? Bottero is well? Velona is well? Mertois is well?" He asked after people he knew. He didn't waste time asking after Orosei — he knew the master-at-arms was dead.
"Mertois has a broken leg. He will limp ever after," Aderno said. "The rest of us are well enough. Bottero and Velona are wild for revenge against the savages. The Grenye can't do that to real men and expect to get away with it."
The first few times the Ivans gave the Wehrmacht a good clout, German soldiers felt the same way. Poland and the West and the Balkans had been easy. Nothing came easy in Russia, not even the victories. And, as year followed year, those got harder and harder to find. Sorry, Aderno. You don't get wal
kovers forever, no matter how much you wish you did.
Or maybe you did with magic. The Lenelli sure thought so. They'd stripped themselves thin of wizards before the latest battle. What they'd had was Hasso, in fact. But nobody'd suggested that he try a spell to see if the Bucovinans were up to any funny business. Nobody'd imagined they could be. So much for understanding the enemy!
When Hasso didn't answer right away, Aderno said, "We can do it! By the goddess, outlander, we can!"
When he called on the goddess again, the cult statue grew more distinct. So did Velona's face. Were they two sides of the same coin? Hasso was no damn good at such things. The doctrine of the Trinity and the notion of transubstantiation only made his head ache. It wasn't the goddess' voice that called to him, though. It was Velona's: "Are you all right, Hasso Pemsel?"
"Hello, sweetheart. Yes, I'm doing well enough, I guess," Hasso answered. "I hope you are."
"I miss you," she said. "I didn't think I would, but I do. I want to get you back. If I have to burn down all of Bucovin to do it and kill all the stinking Grenye savages in the way, I will."
Not even the Fuhrer was that blunt. Hasso didn't doubt she meant every word of it. Whatever else you said about Velona, she'd never once made the acquaintance of hypocrisy.
"Have they tried to trick you into doing things for them? Have they given you sluts to try to make you forget me?" she asked.
"I don't do anything for them. And I can never forget you. You know that." Hasso didn't answer all of the last question. He had to share Velona with the king. How could she get mad at him for somebody like Leneshul?
Maybe you couldn't keep secrets in a dream. Whether he told her or not, she knew. And she didn't like it for beans. "I am a goddess! I do what I have to do!" she cried. "You — you're only a man! How dare you take some smelly little black-haired twat? How dare you?"
Much too late, he remembered she hadn't wanted him sniffing around Grenye serving girls back in Drammen, either. What could he say? That he had no idea whether he'd ever get away from Falticeni? She should have been able to see it for herself. If she could, she didn't care — she was playing the woman scorned right up to the hilt.
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