"In a while, maybe. Not right now," Hasso answered.
She frowned. "Even if you get no more bad dreams, it's not healthy for a man to go without a woman too long. You'll get grumpy and grouchy."
"If I have a woman I don't care about, it's not much better than no woman at all," Hasso said.
"I'm sorry Leneshul didn't please you as much as I hoped she would," Drepteaza said. "But I don't know what to do about that."
"You could — " Hasso broke off.
"What?"
"Nothing. It's nothing." Hasso buried his nose in a mug of beer. Me and my goddamn big mouth, he thought.
"What is it?" Drepteaza persisted. "If it is anything reasonable, we will do it for you. You do seem to be helping us. We pay our debts."
Reasonable? That was funny, or would have been if only he were laughing. He took another pull at the beer. Even in wartime Germany, it would have been pretty bad. By local standards, it was pretty good. If only I knew something about brewing. If only I knew something about anything. "Nothing," Hasso said again.
Drepteaza looked severe. "You say it is nothing. Then you will get angry because we can't guess what it is and deliver it to you without being asked. We know how these things go — we've seen them before."
She wasn't going to leave him alone. He could see that coming like a rash — or like a salvo of Katyusha rockets from a Stalin Organ. Well, maybe the truth would shut her up. She couldn't get too mad — he hoped — not when she'd asked for it. "If I wanted any woman in my bed, it would be you." Any Bucovinan woman. Yes, he had to make the reservation even after Velona tried to kill him. If that didn't say he had it bad, what would?
He didn't shock the priestess. To his immense relief, he saw that right away. He saw no answering spark flash, though. Damn! "It is a compliment. I ought to thank you for it. I do thank you for it," she said slowly.
"But." Hasso packed a world — two worlds — of bitterness into one word.
"Yes. But." Drepteaza did him the courtesy of not misunderstanding, and of not beating around the bush the way he had. "I am very sorry, Hasso Pemsel, but when I look at you I see a Lenello. I don't know what else to say. I don't think anything else needs saying — do you?"
The Lenelli looked down their noses at Grenye. That the Grenye might look up their noses at the Lenelli — they weren't tall enough to look down them — hadn't crossed Hasso's mind. The Lenelli, after all, looked like Aryans. Of course they were better than these little swarthy people… weren't they?
Didn't he himself want to sleep with Drepteaza more in spite of her looks than because of them? Well, yes and no. Yes, she was small and dark. But she was also very pretty and, as he knew from the baths, made just the way a woman ought to be. Maybe she was built no better than Leneshul. Even so, she was a hundred times as interesting — which had nothing to do with looks.
"You don't say anything," Drepteaza remarked.
"What am I supposed to say? I already say too much," Hasso answered.
She sent him a wry smile. "You're no Lenello, regardless of how you look. If you were, you would be telling me how wonderful you were and what an honor it would be for me to open my legs for you."
Hasso's ears felt on fire. Well-bred women in Germany didn't talk about opening their legs even after you propositioned them. They might do it, but they didn't talk about it so baldly. He tried to match her tone: "If you don't already know I am wonderful, what can I say to make you believe it?"
"Probably nothing." Few German women had Drepteaza's devastating honesty, either. She went on, "I look at you, and I see things like Muresh. I see a countryside full of massacres like that, from here all the way west to the seacoast. And I should be honored to sleep with you?" She shuddered.
She might as well be a Jew looking at an SS man, Hasso thought. He did some shuddering of his own. The SS was bound to be out of business now. The Jews who were left in Europe, and the Jews from America and Russia, were having their turn. Hasso didn't — couldn't — know what was going on in the Reich now in the aftermath of a lost war, but he wasn't sorry not to be there to see it. Hard times: he was sure of that.
And if the Jews were taking revenge, could the Grenye of Bucovin do the same? The Jews hadn't had to worry about magic. Oh, some of the Nazi bigwigs dabbled in the occult, but it sure didn't do them a pfennig's worth of good. It was real here, though — no doubt about it. And I'm helping these dark little mindblind…?
If I want to keep on living, I am.
Besides… "No matter what I look like, I am not a Lenello," Hasso said carefully.
"Yes, so you keep insisting, and it seems to be true. But you still look like one, so it helps you less than you think even if it is." The skin at the corners of Drepteaza's eyes crinkled; the ends of her mouth turned up the tiniest bit. "And we both know a man will say anything at all to coax a woman into bed with him."
"What?" Hasso did his best to look comically astonished.
It must have worked — Drepteaza burst out laughing, which didn't happen every day, or every week, either. She wagged a finger at him. "You are a wicked man. Wicked, I tell you."
Most of her was kidding; she made that plain enough. But down underneath, at some level, she had to mean it. And so Hasso couldn't just go on with the joke and say something like, At your service. Instead, he said, "Well, the Lenelli think so, too."
"Yes." The priestess sent him a hooded look. "And it could be, couldn't it, that all of us are right?"
A blizzard roared in that afternoon. If anything, it came as a relief to Hasso. It took his mind off the foot he'd stuck in his mouth, anyway. Listening to the wind wail, watching it blow snow past almost horizontally, reminded him there were bigger things in the world than his own foolishness. For a while that morning, he hadn't been so sure.
Then his nose started to freeze, so he quit watching the blowing snow. It wasn't anything he hadn't seen before — that was for damn sure. Next to some of the blizzards he'd seen in Russia and Poland, this one was no more than a plucky amateur.
He wondered how soon he'd regret telling Leneshul to get lost. Then he didn't wonder any more: he'd regret it as soon as he got horny again. That was as plain as the — chilly — nose on his face.
But, dammit, she wasn't what he wanted. Yeah, any pussy was better than none, but he missed Velona. There was a woman and a half — well, more than a woman and a half, when you got right down to it. A woman and a goddess.
Drepteaza wasn't a woman and a half. She was so short, she hardly seemed one whole woman. But she was, and then some. And so? So she didn't want him.
"I can't win," he muttered. Maybe she was a lousy lay. Maybe she'd think he was a lousy lay. Maybe they just wouldn't work. Maybe I'm trying to tell myself the grapes are sour because I don't get to taste them. Aesop was no dummy. He knew how things worked, all right.
A Lenello woman came in with his supper. Mutton stew, it smelled like, and heavy on the garlic. He didn't much care for garlic, but the Bucovinans put it in everything this side of beer. The pitcher of beer wouldn't be anything to write home about, either — as if he could write home from here. Then again, the natives could have boiled him in beer and shoved garlic cloves up his ass, so how could he complain?
"Good day," the serving girl said in Lenello.
"Good day," Hasso answered in his bad Bucovinan.
"You have heard about the trouble?" she asked. Most of the people who dealt with him here knew more Lenello than he did. Back when the German tribes bumped up against Rome, how many Goths and Franks would have spoken Latin? Quite a few, probably.
"No. What trouble?" Hasso stuck to Bucovinan — he needed the practice. He was also out of the gossip loop. No surprise — he was a foreigner who didn't speak any known language very well.
Still in Lenello, the serving woman said, "Your people attack our border villages again. Much burning. Much killing."
"My people? I have no people here," Hasso said.
She looked at him as if he were a
n idiot. That had to be what she was thinking, too. "King Bottero's people," she said, speaking slowly and plainly. "You are from King Bottero's kingdom, yes?"
Hasso couldn't even say no. That had been his local address till the Bucovinans captured him. Even so, he told the serving woman the same thing he'd told Drepteaza: "I am not a Lenello."
Drepteaza listened to him. Drepteaza appreciated subtleties. Even Rautat recognized the possibility that he might be different from the rest of Bottero's men. The serving woman just sniffed. "You look like a Lenello. You come from Bottero's kingdom. What are you supposed to be, a parsnip?" She walked out of the room without giving him a chance to answer.
"Ja. A goddamn parsnip," he said in German. "What am I supposed to be? God, I wish I knew." He poured beer from the pitcher into a mug. She hadn't given him enough to get drunk on. The Grenye of Bucovin didn't get smashed every chance they could, the way so many Grenye in the Lenello kingdoms seemed to. These natives didn't have to measure themselves against the big, blond, magic-using invaders every hour of the day, every day of the week. They still kept some sense of their own worth.
He ate the stew. Damned if it didn't have parsnips in it. So now he was part parsnip, anyhow. He put more charcoal on the brazier, crawled under his furs and blankets, and went to bed. What else did he have to do when he wasn't making gunpowder? He hadn't taken a woman: not Leneshul, not Drepteaza, not even this snippy servant. He hoped Aderno and Velona wouldn't hound him in his dreams. After everything else today, that would have been too much, even if he lived through it.
They didn't. He got a full night's sleep — or most of one, anyway. Somebody banged on his door before the sun came up the next morning. When he opened it, Rautat stood in the hallway. "Can you use your gunpowder against the Lenelli?" he asked. The German word sounded odd in his mouth. "Have you got enough?"
"Do I have a choice?" Hasso said. "If I do, I'd rather not."
Rautat scowled. "You better talk to Lord Zgomot. He sent me."
XVIII
People who ran stuff didn't like you to tell them no. It didn't matter whether you called them lord or king or Fuhrer — they still didn't like it for beans. Stories about Hitler's tantrums — even his carpet-chewing — made the whispered rounds in Germany. When you said no to Bottero, he could look as if he wanted to pinch your head off.
And as for Lord Zgomot… well, he just looked mournful. "We have some of this thing. It is, for once, a thing the Lenelli have not got. Why not use it against them, then?"
"Lord, if you order, I use it," Hasso said — he didn't want to push his luck too far. "But this is not the best time."
"They are on our land again," Zgomot said. "They are killing and raping and robbing, the way they do. Why is this a bad time?" His tone said Hasso had better have himself some goddamn good reasons.
And Hasso thought he did. He ticked them off on his fingers as he spoke: "First, Lord, not much gunpowder yet. We have more later." The Lord of Bucovin nodded impatiently — he knew that. Hasso went on, "Second thing is, better not to let Lenelli know what you have too soon, yes? These are raids, yes? Better to use gunpowder in big fight, get big win, not let them see what it does till too late."
He wished he could talk better. Even in Lenello, he sounded like a jerk to himself. Why should Zgomot take him seriously if he sounded like a jerk? And it was a good thing he didn't have to try to speak Bucovinan. He was better at it than he had been when he got to Falticeni, which meant — dismayingly little, when you came right down to it. He still needed to go some to get to sound like a jerk in Bucovinan.
Lord Zgomot sat lonely on his throne, thinking things over. Torches crackled as they burned in their sconces. Fat candles glowed to either side of the high seat. All the same, in the predawn stillness the throne room was a cold, dark, drafty place. Torches and candles couldn't push darkness back the way lightbulbs did.
At last, the Lord of Bucovin sighed. It was cold enough in there to let Hasso see his breath smoke. "You make more sense than I wish you did," he said, speaking slowly and carefully — Hasso remembered Lenello was a foreign language for him, too. "Let it be as you say. I will move against the bandits with ordinary soldiers, as we have already begun to do."
Hasso bowed. "You are wise, Lord."
"Am I?" Zgomot's tone was as bleak and wintry as the air inside the throne room. "You know I do not trust you completely, or even very far. You know I wonder if you do not want to use the gunpowder because you fear it will hurt the Lenelli and you are still loyal to them in your heart."
He was uncommonly blunt — scarily blunt, in fact. The dagger of ice that went up Hasso's back had nothing to do with the cold in here. "It is not so," the Wehrmacht officer insisted. "I want to hurt them more. I am sorry it needs to be later. This is not a big enough field to do it the good way, the, uh, right way."
"So you say." Zgomot leaned forward a little to eye him more closely. "So you say, when you lay with the Lenello goddess and our priestess does not care to lie with you. Never mind that you are tall and fair and they are tall and fair and we are not so tall and not so fair. Woman trouble will turn a man towards one side and against the other as easily as anything else. More easily than a lot of things."
Hasso thought of Helen of Troy, and of Brunhilde. Zgomot wasn't wrong, not speaking generally. And Hasso longed for Velona the way the tongue longs for a tooth after it got pulled. Never mind that it was hurting you. The tongue still wanted it to be there, wanted things to go on as they always had. It won't happen, tongue, Hasso thought.
"Velona tries to kill me now twice in my dreams," he told the Lord of Bucovin.
"So you say."
"Yes, Lord. So I say. If I am a liar about this, I am a liar about everything."
"That thought has also crossed my mind." Zgomot's voice grew more wintry than ever. "And what about Drepteaza, Hasso Pemsel?"
"Why ask me? Why not ask her?" Hasso spread his hands. "A woman who does it but doesn't want to… Not much fun in that. I think it's a shame — that is no lie. But what can I do?"
"No, you are not a Lenello," Zgomot said, as several Bucovinans had before him. Hasso waited to find out why the sovereign didn't think so. He didn't have to wait long. Zgomot continued, "Most of the big blond bastards — excuse me — force our women for the fun of it. We have seen that. I daresay you have seen it, too."
"Yes, I see that." Hasso admitted what he could scarcely deny. He might have argued that it wasn't true of most Lenelli, but he knew it was true of enough to make Zgomot's point for him.
"Maybe, in this snow, we can ambush a raiding party…" Careful and methodical, the Lord of Bucovin started making plans to deal with the enemy even if he couldn't do it the way he'd wanted.
The Lenelli didn't understand why they had trouble beating Bucovin when so many other Grenye kingdoms fell at the first shove. Hasso wondered whether Zgomot's father and grandfather were as clever as he was. That might go a long way towards explaining things.
And why did magic have more trouble the closer you got to Falticeni? Hasso didn't know. Neither did the Lenelli. Obviously, neither did the Bucovinans. There had to be a reason. How would you go about finding out? A real wizard might know. Hasso hadn't the faintest idea.
Maybe he was lucky such things didn't work so well here. Maybe that had helped keep Velona and Aderno from cooking his brains in his dream. He had no idea how to go about learning whether that was so, either.
Lord Zgomot seemed to remember he was there. "You may go, Hasso Pemsel. For better or worse, you persuaded me. You persuaded me you aren't deliberately lying to help Bottero's men, anyhow. I am not sure you are right, but I am not sure you are wrong, either, so I will take your advice."
King Bottero might or might not have listened to him. Whether he did or not, he wouldn't have analyzed things so carefully. Hitler… Telling Hitler no wasn't a good idea. Of course, telling him yes might not be a good idea, either, because he often demanded the impossible.
Hasso got
out of the throne room as inconspicuously as he could. When you were a big blond in a land full of squat brunets, that wasn't very. Lord Zgomot's guards and his courtiers all followed him with their eyes till he was gone.
One thing Zgomot hadn't asked him to do once gunpowder was out of the picture: he hadn't asked him to go to Bucovin's western marches and either fight against the Lenelli or use his magic against them. Why not? An obvious question with an only too obvious answer. He doesn't trust me that far. He said so himself.
He almost turned back and volunteered to go fight the Lenelli, with bare hands if need be. But he knew Zgomot would turn him down, and for reasons other than mistrust. The Wehrmacht wouldn't have handed a top panzer engineer a Schmeisser and sent him out against the Ivans. He was more useful making better panzers, and no corporal plucked from the ranks could replace him at that. Here, Hasso might be able to stand in for a Bucovinan horseman, but no native could stand in for him.
No Lenello wizard could stand in for him, either. I'm unique, he thought. If he'd known he would be so alone after he sat down on the Omphalos… he would have damn well done it anyway. Whatever his troubles were in this new world, they beat the hell out of getting shot in Berlin or enduring the Red Army's not so tender mercies. Whenever he felt bad about the way things were going, he needed to remember that. And he needed to remember that the difference between bad and worse was a lot bigger than the difference between good and better.
Rautat ran into him in the hallway, surely not by accident. "Well?" the underofficer asked. "Did you talk the lord out of using gunpowder?"
"Yes, I do that. Did that," Hasso answered. His Lenello wouldn't get any better in Falticeni. Pretty soon he'd have a Bucovinan accent to go with the German accent he'd never be able to help. Then he'd sound really funny to somebody from Drammen.
"Well, well!" Rautat didn't even try to hide his surprise. "You don't change Zgomot's mind every day." He laughed at himself. "I never change his mind. If not for you, he wouldn't know who the demon I am. Life would be easier that way, too."
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