After the downfall

by Harry Turtledove

  "Aderno!" she cried. "Center my power while I smite this wretch!"

  Hasso was a wizard of sorts. An ordinary man might well not have escaped the goddess' wrath. He could feel it building like heat lightning on a hot summer day in the southern Ukraine. How to flee? How to get away?

  He screamed himself awake.

  XVI

  He must have done some impressive shrieking. Next thing he knew, three guards were in the room with him, each man with a sword in one hand and a torch in the other. Their shadows swooped around and behind them like something out of a scary movie. Nobody in this whole goddamn world knows what that means, Hasso thought miserably. Nobody but me.

  "What happened?" the first guard asked.

  "Why did you yell?" said the second.

  "Did somebody try to do something to you?" asked the third.

  "Don't be stupid, Elyash," the first guard said. "Nobody in here but him — and us. Anybody who wants to get at him has to come through us, right? Nobody did, right?"

  It wasn't necessarily so. Hasso wished it were. "Princess Drepteaza come see me?" he asked in his rudimentary Bucovinan.

  The guards looked at one another. They didn't want to bother her in the middle of the night. It wasn't quite the raw fear that would have made flunkies hesitate before disturbing Velona. That could be dangerous in all kinds of ways, including physically. Drepteaza wouldn't — couldn't — blast you where you stood. That didn't make the little swarthy men eager to wake her up.

  But the second guard said, "That shriek he let out… Maybe we'd better. We can blame it on him."

  Hasso didn't think he was supposed to catch that. He held his face still. Knowing more of the language than they thought he did couldn't hurt. After a little more guttural wrangling, the trooper called Elyash went off to see if Drepteaza would come. One of the others used his torch to light a lamp for Hasso. Then they withdrew from the room, leaving him alone in the dim, flickering light.

  He could have gone back to sleep… if he'd had the nerve. How many times during the war had he heard a bullet crack past him? More than he could count — he knew that. His scars spoke of times that hadn't been misses, but he wasn't thinking about those. He was thinking he might have dodged something worse than a bullet, something on the order of a 155mm shell. And, unlike a 155, it might still be waiting for him if he lay down and closed his eyes.

  Will I ever be able to sleep again? he wondered. Soldiers on the Russian front always talked about sleeping with one eye open so the Ivans couldn't sneak up and cut their throats. But what happened when somebody could sneak up on you from inside your own head? Hasso shivered. Nothing good, that was what.

  "Velona," he whispered sadly. Why couldn't she understand about Leneshul, even a little bit? But the answer to that formed as fast as the question. Because she was who and what she was, that was why. She wouldn't let a native girl upstage her, even if she wasn't there to be upstaged.

  What did they call using a woman to get information out of a prisoner? A honey trap. The Bucovinans could have been tearing his toenails out. They could still start any time they pleased, too. Bless them, the fools, they'd given him a woman instead. And he hadn't even told Leneshul anything. He'd just used her as a nicely rounded sleeping pill to evade bad dreams.

  The door opened. In came Drepteaza, her hair all awry and her face twisted from fighting against a yawn. "More trouble in the night?" she asked in Lenello.

  "Ja," Hasso said. She nodded; she'd come to understand that. He wished he could go on in German; even in Lenello, he couldn't speak smoothly. But German, like memories of movies, was his alone here. Lenello, then: "Those dreams in the night — now I know what makes them."

  "And?" Drepteaza waited for him to tell her what she needed to know. The feeble lamplight left her eyes enormous.

  "A wizard from Bottero's kingdom sends to me in my sleep," Hasso said.

  Her jaw set, as if she were taking a blow she hoped she was braced for. "I wondered whether that was so," she said softly, as much to herself, Hasso judged, as to him. She made herself stand straight. "And what does the wizard want?"

  "To get me back for the Lenelli." Hasso answered with the truth. That was what Aderno had wanted, anyway, till Velona found out Hasso was laying a Grenye woman. Now they probably both wanted him trussed and roasted and served up with an apple in his mouth like a suckling pig.

  "They think you know things," Drepteaza remarked. Hasso kept quiet, which struck him as the safest thing he could do just then — not that anything seemed very safe at the moment. The priestess eyed him. "But these are bad dreams for you. Elyash said you screamed tonight: screamed like a man over hot coals, he told me."

  And how did Elyash know what a man sounded like when he hung over hot coals? Better not to inquire, chances were. "This is a bad dream tonight, yes," Hasso said.

  "Why?" Drepteaza asked.

  Hasso wondered whether he ought to evade that question. As much as Velona didn't like native women, Drepteaza didn't like Velona. The Lenello woman had already tried to fry his brains from the inside out. What would the Bucovinan woman do? Did he want to find out?

  On the other hand, what exactly did he scream when he woke up? Did the guards hear it? Did it have Velona's name in it? If he lied and Drepteaza found out, what would she do then? Again, did he want to find out?

  He decided he didn't. Hell had no fury like a woman scorned? How about a woman hoodwinked? And so, carefully, he said, "Velona is — was — in this dream."

  "Oh, really?" No, the Bucovinan priestess didn't like that, not even a little bit. She didn't like anything that had anything to do with Velona. But her frown was more one of concentration than of fury — Hasso hoped so, anyhow. "You like Velona, though. You love Velona." Drepteaza made it sound indescribably perverse. "Why do you say seeing her was bad? And why did she appear in the dream in the first place?"

  Drepteaza might be a native woman who only came halfway up Hasso's chest. That didn't mean she was a fool. Oh, no — on the contrary. How many people in Hasso's world had come to grief by equating the two? The Fuhrer had in Russia. The Wehrmacht officer hoped he wouldn't make the same mistake himself, not when she'd picked two vital questions.

  He answered them in the opposite order from which she'd asked them: "She appears because she wants — wanted — to get me back to Drammen." The past tense mattered here. He kept using it: "And seeing her was bad because she… got angry because of Leneshul."

  "She did, did she?" Drepteaza laughed. "That's the funniest thing I ever heard. What does she expect you to do when you're here and not with her and you won't be going back to her? Sit around and play with your dick all the time?"

  Hasso didn't care for the sound of and you won't be going back to her. Nothing he could do about it, though. And Velona probably did expect him to do just that, or else to live in the glorious memories of her. Life didn't work that way, but he thought it was what she expected.

  Maybe Drepteaza did, too, for she shook her head and exclaimed, "The nerve of that woman!" She really did sound indignant.

  "Sorry to bother you," Hasso said.

  "Don't worry about it. I wouldn't have missed this for the world." Drepteaza paused, just when Hasso thought she would get in her last little dig and go back to bed. Maybe it was only a trick of the dim, unreliable lamplight, but suddenly she looked much older and much more worried. In a voice that tried to stay casual but didn't quite succeed, she asked, "You don't have anything to do with magic, do you?"

  Rautat had asked him that before, but this time the question took him by surprise. If he'd been expecting it, he could have said, Of course not, and that would have been that. But what came out of his mouth was, again, the exact and literal truth: "I can do a little, but I don't know much about it."

  "You… can… do… a… little." He never forgot how Drepteaza spaced out the words, or how enormous her eyes seemed. That was also partly a trick of the light, yes, but it seemed somehow more. She stabbed out a finger at
him. "Why didn't you say so before?"

  "What good does it do you? You can't trust me. Even if you could trust me, I'm not a quarter trained. I'm not a quarter of a quarter trained. What I know is this." Hasso held his thumb and index finger close together. "What the Lenelli know is this" He threw his arms wide.

  Drepteaza's eyes narrowed now, narrowed dangerously. She didn't believe him. "But they wouldn't care about you if you didn't know things we don't."

  "Neither would you," he pointed out.

  "Of course we wouldn't — are we fools?" She didn't waste time denying it. "But if they want you back so much, that means — " She broke off. Hasso could fill in the blank. That means you're worth something after all.

  If he denied it, they'd knock him over the head. No more Leneshul. It would be toenail-tearing time. "In the world I come from, there is no magic," Hasso said. "What I know has nothing to do with magic. It has to do with, uh, arts and craft." No way to say technology or engineering in Lenello.

  "So we could use it as well as the blonds?" Drepteaza said. Hasso didn't say yes or no. She went on, "You had better show us some of this."

  "You know why I don't. I have an oath to King Bottero." Hasso liked the Lenelli. He felt he could almost become one of them if he stayed here long enough and got used to their ways. In Bucovin his looks, if nothing else, would leave him a stranger the rest of his life. He would be as bad off as a Jew in Germany. Maybe worse — some Jews looked like Aryans. He sure as hell didn't look like a Grenye. A good thing they took oaths more seriously here than in his own world.

  "Velona tried to harm you, yes?" Drepteaza said. "The wizard tried to harm you, yes? What is your oath to their king worth to you if it's worth nothing to them? Or do you think they struck at you without his knowledge, without his let?"

  "I don't know," Hasso said slowly. "I have to think about that." It was worth thinking about, too. Priestesses were supposed to have answers, weren't they? He didn't know whether Drepteaza did. She sure had some good questions, though.

  "We have to think about you, too," she said. "You can't do much! Oh, Lavtrig preserve us!" She walked out of the room shaking her head.

  When Hasso got breakfast the next morning, the serving girl who gave him his tray looked at him as if he had horns and a tail and she thought he'd start breathing fire any minute. The morning before, she'd laughed and joked with him. She'd taken him for granted. She didn't any more. He knew what that had to mean.

  "Only I," he said, knowing he'd botched the Bucovinan grammar as soon as the words were out of his mouth. But Jiril didn't speak Lenello — or at least she'd never let on that she did.

  She might have just found a scorpion in her sock. "Wizard!" she said, and aimed at him a pronged gesture that couldn't possibly do her any good.

  He sighed. Either Drepteaza had blabbed — which didn't seem likely, but wasn't even close to impossible — or the guards had overheard and started running their mouths. It made no real difference. Any which way, the cat was out of the bag.

  The Lenelli admitted that some of their renegades had used magic for the natives. The Bucovinans had said the same thing. They'd also talked about the trouble they had keeping Lenello wizards using the magic for them and not to rule them… Or worse, Hasso thought. If the SS had had magic to help it clear out the ghettos in Poland and Russia, wouldn't it have used every spell it could? In a heartbeat. Hasso had no doubts about that at all.

  What could he do? He muttered to himself. What he could do and what he might do were two different creatures. Could he run a panzer without training? Not bloody likely. So why should he expect to work magic without learning how?

  But the Bucovinans probably thought he could. All they knew about magic was that they couldn't work any. That might be useful.

  Or it might get him killed, if they decided it made him too dangerous to leave alive. And he couldn't do a damn thing about it. Some wizard that made him!

  How Jiril looked at him wasn't the only sign that things had changed. Nobody else came in all morning. The guards didn't want to let him out, either. He was half surprised that they didn't come in and take away his furniture. The maid who brought him lunch seemed less frightened than Jiril had, but she also wasn't easy with him.

  No sign of Leneshul at all, dammit.

  Drepteaza didn't visit till late afternoon. When she did, a full complement of tough-looking guards came in with her. The natives hadn't bothered with that for a while. They looked ready to ventilate him if he breathed funny, too. Maybe not back to square one, but square two? It seemed that way, worse luck.

  Drepteaza didn't act afraid, but she didn't act even halfway friendly any more, either. What did her expression mean? Something on the order of more in sorrow than in anger, Hasso judged. And, sure enough, the first words out of her mouth were, "What are we supposed to do with you, Hasso Pemsel?"

  The way she used his full name reminded him of Velona, a sudden stab he really didn't need just then. She spoke in her own language, but he answered in Lenello: "Priestess, you should set me free and give me a big estate and servants and plenty of gold and silver to pay for them."

  She blinked. Whatever she'd expected, that wasn't it. One of the guards glowered at him. Another one laughed. They knew Lenello, then. After a moment, Drepteaza said, "Maybe that would keep us safe from you. If we were sure it would, it might be worthwhile. Killing you is surer — and cheaper."

  She wasn't kidding. She didn't joke very often, and he always knew when she did. Much too conscious that he was talking for his life, he said, "I am a captive for some time now. You could kill me whenever you want."

  "Before, we knew you were a snake. Now we know you are a viper," Drepteaza said. "You can do more and worse to us than we thought."

  "Or I can do more and better for you," Hasso said.

  "Maybe you can. But you still have your famous oath to King Bottero — Bottero the invader, Bottero the robber, Bottero the murderer, Bottero the torturer." No, Drepteaza wasn't joking. "The goddess who does not care what a man is, the wizard who tries to slay his own lord's sworn man. Do they deserve your oath, Hasso Pemsel?"

  That was a different way of asking what she'd asked the night before. Unhappily, Hasso said, "They're worried about what I can do, what I know. So are you, remember."

  "There is a difference," Drepteaza said.

  "What?" Hasso asked.

  She gave him a look that said he was either disingenuous or very, very stupid. "You already helped them. That attacking column you showed them, and whatever magic you worked for Bottero…"

  Not to mention rescuing Velona, Hasso thought. The Bucovinans didn't know about that, which was a good thing for him. He uncomfortably recalled the spell he'd made to find the underwater bridges. The natives didn't know about that, either, and Hasso wasn't a bit sorry they didn't.

  "In my world, a prisoner only has to give his name, his rank, and his pay number to his enemies," he said. Never mind that people broke the rules all the time when they needed to squeeze something out of somebody. The rules were what they were.

  "You give your soldiers numbers?" Drepteaza frowned. "Why aren't names enough?"

  "We have more soldiers than we have names — many more," Hasso answered. When he told her how many men the Wehrmacht held, she didn't want to believe him. Neither had the Lenelli when he talked about such things.

  Unlike the Lenelli, who usually thought they knew it all, Drepteaza didn't argue with him. She just said, "Well, let that be as it may," and went on, "You are not in your world now, Hasso Pemsel. You are here, and you have to live by our rules."

  "Don't I know it!" he exclaimed.

  "We could have killed you. We could have killed you the width of a millet grain at a time. We could have sent you to the mines — a living death. Did we do any of that? No. We treated you well. Don't you want that to go on?"

  "Of course I do. But you don't do it for me. You do it for you," Hasso said.

  "And Bottero helped you just because
he liked you." The priestess could be formidably sarcastic. Hasso didn't know what to say, so he kept his big mouth shut. Drepteaza looked through him. "So you still need to think, do you? If you must, you can do that — for a little while, anyway." Out she went.

  Nothing much changed for the next few days. One thing did, though: Leneshul stopped coming to him. He knew what that meant: the Bucovinans weren't going to let anything stand in the way of whatever magic Aderno and Velona aimed at him. Whose clever idea was that? Drepteaza's? Lord Zgomot's? The trouble was, it was clever. If the people he called his friends kept trying to kill him, how long would he, could he, stay friendly to them?

  If they did kill him, not very long.

  If they didn't… Hasso hoped Drepteaza was counting on his living through whatever the Lenelli aimed at him. He hoped so, yes, but he couldn't be sure.

  Since he didn't have a woman, he took matters into his own hands, so to speak. But, as he'd found with Leneshul, he couldn't get it up every day. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was older than that, dammit. Had he been twenty-one… One night, he fell asleep unshielded by self-abuse. He'd seen Velona in his dreams before, but not the way he had when she and Aderno assailed him.

  He'd had dreams the past few nights that made him think he would have company when he slept unwarded by pleasure of any sort: dreams that reminded him of someone knocking on a distant door.

  Tonight, the door wasn't distant. Tonight, Aderno didn't bother to knock — he just walked on in. "Ah, there you are," he said, as if he and Hasso were picking up a conversation after breaking off to eat lunch.

  Hasso suggested that the wizard and his unicorn enjoyed a relationship different from mount and rider. It was a male unicorn.

  "Naughty, naughty," Aderno said, his voice surprisingly mild. "That was a — a misunderstanding, you might say."