"Life is never easy. It has teeth." Hasso pointed to the dragon's fang that had been here since before the Lenelli crossed the ocean and found this new land for themselves.
Rautat eyed the formidable fang. "Most of the time, I hope, not such sharp ones."
Hasso wouldn't have wanted anything with teeth like that crunching down on him, either. "Dragons live in the north?" he asked, pointing in that direction.
"Yes, of course. Everybody knows that." Rautat caught himself. "Everybody but you, I guess. No dragons in the place you come from?"
"Only mothers-in-law," Hasso answered.
It wasn't much of a joke — he didn't think so, anyhow. Rautat blushed like a scandalized schoolgirl, though, and giggled like one, too. "We… don't usually talk about those people," he said. "You startled me when you did. Like dragons? Oh, my!" He started giggling again.
He not only didn't like to talk about mothers-in-law, he wouldn't even name them. Hasso wondered how big a taboo he'd just violated. Not a small one, not by Rautat's reaction.
"How often do dragons come down here?" Hasso asked. Maybe he could find out more about the mother-in-law business from Drepteaza. It might give him something to talk about with her that wasn't too dangerously intimate, anyhow. "Can you make them go one way or another?" he persisted. Vague thoughts of siccing a dragon on the Lenelli flitted through his mind.
"Dragons come when they want to come. You can't do anything about it. We were lucky to kill even one," Rautat said. "We thought it was a miracle. We thought we were wonderful. Then the big blonds came out of the west, and we found out we weren't so wonderful as we thought."
The way his eyes traveled Hasso's long frame said the German was still about ninety-eight percent Lenello to him, too — maybe ninety-nine percent. Since he felt much more Lenello than Grenye here himself, and since those were the only choices he had in this world, how could he blame Rautat — or Drepteaza — for seeing him that way?
Lord Zgomot gave whatever orders he gave. Hasso stayed in the palace in Falticeni. Eventually, he supposed, after everyone else did, he would find out what happened. In the meantime, he could keep on fiddling on with gunpowder, getting ready for the real war he and Zgomot and the rest of Bucovin knew was coming.
He wondered how big a fool he was. Should he have promised the Lord of Bucovin the sun and moon and little stars, gone off toward the western border, and tried to get back to the Lenelli, back to Bottero's kingdom? Magic worked better in the west. He might have put one over on the natives and slipped away without their being the wiser.
Yes? And then what? he asked himself. Would Bottero welcome him back with open arms after he'd given Bucovin the secret of gunpowder? He hadn't even given that to the Lenelli — when was there time? Besides, after rescuing Velona he wasn't in such desperate need of another trick to keep himself alive among them.
And they were more willing to take him at face value. Unhappily, he nodded to himself. That was the phrase, all right. The Lenelli wanted to accept him, because he looked like them. The Grenye didn't, because to them he was guilty of being a Lenello till proved innocent — and probably after that, too.
His thoughts drifted back to the escape he hadn't made, hadn't even tried. What about Velona? Would she welcome him back with open arms? Even more to the point, would she welcome him back with open legs? Not by what he'd seen in his dreams. He hadn't just betrayed the Lenelli, not to the goddess on earth. He'd betrayed her personally when he lay down with Leneshul. That was how she saw it, anyway. She was good at an awful lot of things. Was she good at forgiving? Hasso didn't think so.
"God damn it to hell," he muttered, there in the loneliness of his room. "I am fucked. I am really fucked."
When he came out into the wider loneliness of the palace, he felt the same way. How could he help it? He had trouble getting excited about working on the gunpowder. He stayed careful and attentive with that, because he didn't want to blow himself up. With less urgent items like language lessons, he had trouble meeting even a lesser standard.
Drepteaza noticed right away. "Shall I find you another tutor?" she asked. "Are you so angry that I don't want to go to bed with you that you don't want anything else to do with me anymore? I can understand how you might be. It seems petty to me, but maybe it doesn't to you."
"No. It is not you." To emphasize that, Hasso spoke in Bucovinan as best he could. "It is — everything." His wave took in not only the room, not only the palace, not only Falticeni or Bucovin, but the whole world. "I do not belong here. I never belong here. Never."
"I think you are wrong. I think you must be wrong," the priestess said seriously. "You told me how you came here, how you sat on the stone in your world and then suddenly you found yourself in this one."
"Yes? And so?" Hasso said. The first thing I did when I got here was shoot myself some Grenye. The next thing I did was screw the Lenello goddess on earth. Once upon a time, he'd thought that meant something important. Now? Now he had to do some new thinking.
But Drepteaza insisted, "It must mean something, Hasso Pemsel. Things don't just happen. They happen for a reason."
"What about the Lenelli?" Hasso asked.
She winced, but she had the courage of her convictions. "Even the Lenelli came here for a reason," she said. Then her mouth quirked in one of her wry grins. "To rob, to kill, to rape, to enslave…" But she shook her head. "That is not what I mean. They are part of the larger purpose, too."
"Whose purpose?" Hasso asked. "The purpose of your gods? The purpose of the Lenello goddess?" He didn't bother naming the God he'd left behind in the ruins of Berlin. Once upon a time, he'd been a believing Christian. How you could go on being a believing Christian after five and a half years of war… Well, he hadn't, so what point worrying about that? And they already had plenty of deities running around loose here. What did they need with another one imported by the only man who'd once believed in Him?
"I don't know," Drepteaza answered with another of those disarming grins. "The goddess is real — that is plain. We believe Lavtrig and our other gods are real, too, though they are quieter in the way they poke the world with their fingers. Whether something larger lies behind all that — well, who can say? But the wicked do not triumph forever. Nothing can make me believe that."
Then why did the Reds beat Germany? Hasso wondered. Why wouldn't the USA and England see that Stalin was more dangerous than Hitler ever could be?
Maybe God was out having a few drinks with the Lenello goddess and the Bucovinan gods. That made as much, or as little, sense to Hasso as anything else. He spread his hands. "I have no answers, priestess."
"You would scare me if you said you did," Drepteaza said. "You would scare me worse if you made me believe you." She eyed him. "More than most people, you would make me wonder if you did say something like that."
"Me? All I'm trying to do here is stay alive," Hasso said.
"You've seen another world. You must have had a god — or maybe gods — of your own there."
"Ja. I was just thinking about Him, in fact. He doesn't answer."
"Then why are you here now?"
He shrugged. It was a damn good question. But, again… "I don't know." Did the Omphalos have anything to do with the God Who was also Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? The ancient Greeks wouldn't have said so. Whether they were right — again, Hasso didn't know.
Drepteaza didn't want to leave it alone. "And," she continued, "you spent all that time with the goddess on earth. If you don't know more about such things than most people, who does?"
"I know a good bit about Velona — what a lover can know in the time we were together. A lover who has to learn a language first, I mean." Hasso corrected himself. "About the goddess… All I know about the goddess is that she frightens me. She's… bigger than I am."
"Well, yes," Drepteaza said. "Of course. That's what makes her a goddess. Whether she's big enough to eat Bucovin… She thinks she is. So far, she's proved wrong, but she keeps trying."
"Is that all you need to be a god?" Hasso asked. "To be strong?" He hadn't thought about it in those terms before. Back in his own world, he'd taken for granted the answers other people gave him. He had more trouble doing that here, because he was hearing different things from different people.
Maybe they're all wrong, he thought. But how can I know? How do I make up my mind? He'd never imagined there could be such a thing as too much freedom, but maybe there was.
And Drepteaza looked at him in surprise. "What else is there, Hasso Pemsel?"
Another alarmingly keen question. Hitler and Stalin ruled their countries as virtual gods because they were strong. Some people would say one of them was good and some the other, but who would say they both were? Nobody. Maybe it was true for beings genuinely supernatural, too. Why wouldn't it be?
One reason occurred to him. "A god should be good, too, yes?" That, to him, needed to count more for real gods than for the self-made variety.
"What is good?" Drepteaza asked, and, like Pilate asking about truth, she didn't wait around for the answer.
Reports about the Lenello raiders came back from the west. They plundered and killed, and then they withdrew. How much Bucovinan harassment had to do with that, Hasso couldn't tell. He couldn't tell how much good his gunpowder would have done, either.
He took another lover, a woman named Gishte. He didn't think she was any more excited about him than Leneshul was, but she was more polite about it. That would do — for a while, anyhow.
He made damn sure he never took another bath with Drepteaza. It wouldn't have meant anything to her. That wasn't the point. It would have meant much too much to him. As things were, he played back memories of her nakedness as if he'd been a frontline Signal cameraman filming it on the spot.
All sorts of crazy thoughts went through his head. What would happen if he got enough gunpowder to blow up the castle here? Falticeni and Bucovin would never be the same. Of course, he would also blow himself up, and he didn't want to do that. If he were suicidal, he never would have sat on the Omphalos. He would have fought on till he got killed. It probably wouldn't have taken long.
Rautat made sure he had plenty of beer and mead and even wine. Gishte liked that; she got lit up whenever she saw the chance. That told Hasso some of what she really thought of him, though she didn't slip even when she was drunk.
"What good does drunk do you?" he asked her one morning before she started drinking hard.
"What good does sober do me?" Gishte returned, a counter-question for which, like so many here, he had no good answer. He did hope she wasn't drinking because she was going to bed with a Lenello — or somebody who looked like one. When he came right out and asked her about that, she shook her head. "No, you're not so bad, and the priestess told me I didn't have to screw you if I didn't care to. I just like to get drunk, that's all."
What was he supposed to say to that? Plenty of Lenelli liked to get drunk, too — Scanno came to mind. So did plenty of Germans. As for the Russians, the less said about that, the better. It didn't stop them from beating the snot out of the Wehrmacht. Sometimes it even helped. Waiting in the trenches, you'd hear them getting plowed and yelling and shouting and carrying on, and then they'd come at you not caring if they lived or died. An awful lot of them did die, which too often didn't stop the rest from overrunning your position.
He'd seen so many drunken Grenye in Drammen, he'd figured all drunken Grenye drank to avoid comparing themselves to Lenelli. Didn't Indians do that kind of thing in the United States? Drinking because you liked to get drunk seemed too… ordinary to fit in with being a native.
Maybe I have to start thinking of them as people, Hasso thought. Short, squat, dark, mostly homely people who don't look like me.
Gishte wasn't homely, though she was a long way from gorgeous. He'd bedded gorgeous — he knew about that. The thought of Velona, and of losing Velona, stabbed at him again.
Next to Velona, Drepteaza wasn't gorgeous, either. Well, who was, dammit? Velona turned movie stars plain. With Drepteaza, it didn't seem to matter so much. That was partly because Drepteaza had one hell of a shape of her own, as Hasso had every reason to know.
And it was partly because Drepteaza was interesting. She didn't have the live-wire aura that Velona wore like a second skin, but who did? She also didn't go off like nitro-glycerine if she got angry. She was… good people.
Yeah, she's good people, Hasso jeered at himself. And she doesn't want thing one to do with you, not that way, even if you have seen her naked.
"Hey, don't pour down all of that by yourself," he told Gishte, and he got drunk, too. Why the hell not? He couldn't think of a single reason. Making love with Gishte when they were both smashed was fun, too. He thought so at the time, anyway. And, when you were smashed, you didn't give a rat's ass about anything but right then.
The bad news about a bender was, you had to come down from it. Drepteaza eyed Hasso as if he were something the cat was trying to cover up. "Have a good time yesterday?" she asked at breakfast the next morning.
"Gnurf," he answered, squinting at her through eyes as narrow as he could make them. Wan winter sunlight and torches he usually wouldn't have tried to read by seemed much too bright today.
"You need something better than porridge," she said, and spoke in Bucovinan to a serving woman. The woman came back with a bowl of strong-smelling soup.
"What is it?" Hasso asked suspiciously.
"Tripe and spices," Drepteaza told him. "It takes the edge off things."
Feeling like a man defusing a bomb, he tried it. But the bomb had already gone off, inside his head. The soup did help calm his sour stomach. He thought the mug of beer he downed with it went further toward reconciling him to being alive. To his own surprise, he did get to the bottom of the bowl of soup. "Thanks," he said to Drepteaza in Bucovinan. "Better."
She looked at him like a Feldwebel eyeing a private fresh from the Russian front who'd just painted Paris red… before Paris fell again. "You're not going to be worth much the rest of the day, are you?" She sounded more resigned than critical.
"Sorry." Hasso was sorry about how he felt — that was for sure.
She startled him with a smile. "It happens," she said. "You're a human being, too."
That was how Hasso turned the word into German in his mind, anyhow. The literal meaning of the Bucovinan was somebody who speaks our language. The ancient Greeks had called foreigners barbaroi — people who made bar-bar noises instead of words that meant something. Nemtsi, the Russian name for Germans, meant tongue-tied ones or mutes. Considering how little Bucovinan Hasso actually spoke, Drepteaza either stretched a point or paid him a considerable compliment.
He stood up. He seldom cared to do that around her; it reminded her how different from her folk he was. But right now that was exactly the point. Bowing, he said, "Not a cursed Lenello, eh?"
She bit her lip. Did she turn red? She was too dark and the lighting too gloomy to let Hasso be sure. "You can't help the way you look, Hasso Pemsel," she said. "And I can't help looking at you and seeing… what you look like."
Rumors ran through the Wehrmacht that Hitler didn't trust Field Marshal Manstein because he thought the officer had Jewish blood. Manstein's impressive sickle of a nose no doubt had a lot to do with those rumors. What was this but more of the same?
Hasso sighed. "You see what you want to see, whether it is there or not." To make matters worse, he had to say that in Lenello; it was too complicated to let him turn it into Bucovinan.
"Maybe I do. Probably I do, in fact," Drepteaza said, also in Lenello. "And what do King Bottero and his men see when they look at
us? What does Velona see when she looks at us?" Did her voice take on a certain edge when she named the goddess on earth? Hasso thought so.
Before he answered, he sat down again. Looming over her if he wasn't making a point was just plain rude. Besides, his head hurt less when he got off his feet. "You know what they think," he said uncomfortably. And he'd thought the same thing till he came to Falticeni as a captive. How could he help it?
"Oh, yes. I know." Drepteaza's nod was a ripple atop an ocean of hard-restrained bitterness. "I know too well. We are small and swart and ugly. And the Lenelli can work magic and we can't. To the Lenelli, that turns us into something not much more than beasts. But only a handful of them are wizards. The rest are as mindblind as we are. Does that turn them into beasts, too?"
Scanno had pointed out the same thing. When Hasso stayed in Drammen, he'd never once asked about it. He wondered why not. King Bottero could no more cast a spell than Drepteaza. But Bottero, wizard or not, was tall and fair and blue-eyed. To the Lenelli, that put him several steps up on the natives.
Didn't German propaganda go on and on about Jewish mouths and noses? Didn't the Aryans of the Reich look down their straight noses at Italians because they were small and dark and excitable? Negroes? The less said about Negroes, the better. The Fuhrer hadn't wanted to shake that colored sprinter and jumper's hand even after he won all those gold medals at the Berlin Olympics.
And, coming back to this world, the Bucovinan priestess was dead right. Most Lenelli were as mindblind as her own folk. That didn't turn them into Untermenschen in the eyes of their countrymen.
All that talk was… talk. The Lenelli didn't like the Grenye because they looked different, they talked different, and they were in the way. Those were all common enough reasons for two folk not to like each other: Germans and Frenchmen sprang to mind. But the mindblindness gave the Lenelli an extra excuse to use the natives any way they pleased.
It all seemed as plain as a punch in the jaw to Hasso, who looked at the way things were here from the outside. Suddenly, out of the blue, he wondered what a Lenello dropped into his world would think of the Reich's racial notions. Would they look as foolish to him as Bottero's ideas did to Hasso?
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