After the Downfall (3 page)

Another Lenello made cut - and - thrust motions and shook his head as he asked his own question. That had to be, So
how come you can’t use a sword worth a damn?
Hasso shrugged. Nobody’d ever bothered teaching him a weapon like that. He had no trouble with a spear. If you could fight with a bayoneted rifle and an entrenching tool, spear drill was a piece of cake. He could use a crossbow, too, once he figured out how to crank it up to reload. Its bolts flew flat and straight, like bullets. The Lenelli even had sights to aim along. A hunting bow, on the other hand ... To call him hopeless gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Someone in the watchtower winded a horn. One long, flat note - the warriors relaxed. That meant more Lenelli on the road approaching Castle Svarag. A series of shorter blasts would have been trouble: the Grenye sneaking around again.

Hasso wasn’t sure how things worked around here. He hadn’t seen enough of this world yet. He hadn’t seen any of it, in fact, except for the swamp and the stretch of road between where he’d rescued Velona and this castle. But the Lenelli seemed to have
Untermenschen
problems like the
Reich’s
in Russia. Here on the frontier - and this was the frontier, plainly - the big blond warriors controlled towns, castles, and, when they traveled in force, the roads between them. The countryside belonged to the local barbarians.

Shouts came from outside the castle. Who was who around here was pretty obvious. Even so, the newcomers and guards went through the rigmarole of sign and countersign. That made Hasso chuckle, which hurt his sore stomach and bruised ribs. He might be in another world, but a lot of army rituals stayed the same. What worked one place worked in another. People remained people. Chains rattled and clanked as Grenye servants - or maybe they were slaves - lowered the drawbridge. Horses’ hooves thudded on the thick oak timbers - faced with iron on the outside, to ward against fire as the new arrivals rode in. As one man, the Lenelli in the great hall went out to see what was what. They were as eager for news and gossip as any garrison at an isolated post - and they didn’t have radios. Everybody turned out to see what was what, in fact: everybody who was tall and fair, anyhow. Mertois tramped out half a minute or so behind the warriors in the great hall. More soldiers came out of the stables. Velona and other women took places between and in front of the men. Velona started to smile at Hasso, but the expression froze when she saw he’d been knocked around. He nodded, as if to tell her it was all right.
You should see the other bums,
he thought. Haifa dozen men had come in. Five were knights in slightly rusty chainmail. They were all stamped from the same mold as the soldiers in the garrison. The sixth was ... something else. He rode a unicorn. Hasso blinked and rubbed his eyes. Unicorns were the stuff of myth and legend except this one wasn’t. Its horn was silvered. So were its hooves. They all shone even brighter in the sun than the unicorn’s pure white coat and mane and tale. Its lines made the big, heavy horses around it look as if they were carved by a sculptor who was earnest, well - intentioned, and more than a bit of a blockhead.

The rider made the knights seem the same way. He wore polished jackboots that would have gladdened the heart of an SS man on parade, tight suede breeches, and a clinging shirt of shimmering bright green silk that should have looked effeminate but somehow didn’t. Like the unicorn’s horns and hooves, his conical helm was silvered, and flashed in the sunlight. Only his sword, a businesslike cross - hilted weapon in a battered leather sheath, said he wasn’t a refugee from the set of a bad movie. Graceful as a cat, he slid down from the unicorn. Hasso expected him to march up to Mertois and start giving orders; his harsh, handsome features were those of a man used to being obeyed, and at once. But the stranger strode over to Hasso himself. He didn’t hold out both hands to clasp, as the Lenelli usually did in greeting. Instead, he sketched a star in the air between them. It glowed with gold fire for a moment before fading.

Hasso’s eyes widened, even more than they had when he saw the unicorn. Unicorns were merely legendary. This was flat-out impossible - but it happened anyway.

“You saw?” the stranger demanded ... in Lenello. Yes, he spoke his own language, but Hasso understood as readily as if it were German. That was impossible, too, but as true as the glowing golden star, as true as the unicorn’s switching tail.

“I saw, all right. How the devil did you do that?” Hasso Pemsel answered in German, and the man in boots and breeches and silk also understood him.

“Magic,” the fellow said matter-of-factly. Hasso started to get angry before realizing the newcomer wasn’t kidding. “I’m Aderno, third-rank wizard in King Bottero’s service. You will be the outlander Velona spoke of when she summoned me.”

“Velona... summoned you? Not Mertois?” Hasso wondered whether he’d figured out anything at all about what was going on here. He didn’t even understand the chain of command.

“Yes, Velona, of course.” Aderno took it for granted, whether Hasso did or not. “Now tell me - what color did the star seem to you?”

“Gold,” Hasso answered automatically.

“Gold?
Something, yes, but
gold?”
That was enough to shake Aderno out of his air of snooty superiority. He stared down his long, straight nose at the German. “Are you certain?”

“Why would I lie? And what difference does it make, anyhow?” At last, somebody who could understand Hasso when he said something - and the cocksure son of a bitch didn’t want to believe him. Hasso wondered if he could do unto Aderno as he’d done unto Sholseth. Maybe he could knock sense into that long, arrogant head if he couldn’t insert it any other way.

“You don’t even know.” That wasn’t a question. Aderno turned away and spoke to Velona. When he did, his words were only gibberish to Hasso. His magic seemed as sensitive, and as adjustable, as a radio tuner. Hasso couldn’t follow Velona’s reply, either. He sighed and shrugged. She was the one he really wanted to be able to talk to, and he still couldn’t. Life seemed to work that way. Aderno gave his attention back to him. “Tell me how you came here.” That seemed clear enough. Hasso did. He couldn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t. And talking about it - at last being able to talk about it - was a release, and a relief.

When he finished, Aderno sketched another sign in the air. This one glowed the color of the wizard’s shirt. “The truth,” he said, sounding faintly surprised.

“Why would I lie?” Hasso asked again.

For the first time, Aderno looked at him as if he’d said something stupid. “Outlander, man from another world, there are as many reasons as there are fish in the sea, as many reasons as there are leaves on the trees. You could have been part of some new wicked plot the Grenye have hatched - “

“No!” Velona broke in: one word of Lenello Hasso could follow.

“No,” the wizard agreed. “But it could have been so, which is why I applied the truth test. Or you could have been one of our evildoers on the run, looking to cover your tracks with a tale too wild to be disbelieved. Or you could have been a disgraced man looking to start over somewhere far from where you were born, and using a strange story likewise. Not too hard to pretend not to understand or speak. But no. You are not pretending. And if you saw gold in the air...”

“You still haven’t said what that means,” Hasso reminded him.

“It means your life, and mine, and everyone else’s, get more complicated than any of us might wish,”

Aderno said. Hasso wanted to hit him for talking in circles. Decking a genuine wizard, though, didn’t strike him as smart. Aderno went on, “And it means you can’t stay in this miserable backwater post.”

Mertois grunted at that. Aderno ignored him. “I shall take you to Drammen.” Seeing Hasso look blank, he condescended to explain: “To the capital.”

II

Once the Lenelli made up their minds, they didn’t screw around. Inside of an hour, Hasso was on a horse riding west. He wore his own short boots, trousers, and helmet. Grumbling still, Mertois doled out a padded shirt, a mailshirt to go over it, and a thin surcoat to go over that. The castle commander also gave Hasso a sword. He said something as he did.
For decoration only,
Hasso guessed.
Don’t try to
use it, not if you want to go on breathing.

He still had his Schmeisser. As long as his ammunition lasted, he was the toughest guy in town, even if only Velona knew it. Enough rounds for a few hours against the Russians - or a few minutes if things got hot. How long would it last here? Longer, anyhow, because none of these bastards had a weapon to match it.

Not only Aderno and his escort accompanied Hasso. At the wizard’s urging - or, more likely, command

- Mertois sent along half a dozen of his men. And Velona rode out of Castle Svarag, too, which pleased Hasso for all kinds of reasons. It wasn’t just that they were lovers, though that sure didn’t hurt. But she was his sheet anchor here. Everything that had happened to him since happened because she ran by right after he squelched up onto the causeway.

The machine pistol and the extra magazines fascinated Aderno. Hasso made sure he unloaded the Schmeisser before he let the wizard handle it. Otherwise, Aderno might have killed half the people near him just by clicking the safety off, squeezing the trigger, and spraying the weapon around. The Schmeisser’s cartridges interested Aderno even more than the piece itself did. He held them up close to his face to examine them - much closer than Hasso would have been comfortable eyeing them himself. He hefted first one, then another, then another. At last, reluctantly, he nodded and handed them back to Hasso.

“Your wizards understand the Two Laws well,” he said.

“Which Two Laws?” Hasso asked. He would rather have told Velona what beautiful eyes she had, but he didn’t know nearly enough Lenello for that. Talking to a wizard about sorcery wasn’t the same thing not even close. He did succeed in surprising Aderno, anyhow. Aderno’s eyes were almost as blue as Velona’s, but Hasso wouldn’t have called them beautiful.
Haughty
struck him as a much better word. “Do the wizards in your world guard their secrets so closely, then?” Aderno asked, sounding ... jealous? “You don’t even know what the Laws are?”

“You don’t get it,” Hasso said. “We haven’t got any wizards. Till I sat down on the Omphalos, I didn’t believe in magic. We’ve got scientists. We’ve got factories.” He wondered how the translation spell would handle those two words.

“If that were so, I would call you as mindblind as the Grenye,” Aderno said. “But you saw gold, so I know this cannot be true.” He frowned, studying Hasso like an entomologist looking at a new species of flea through a magnifying glass. “Maybe the very laws of your world are different, forbidding magic or making it difficult.”

“Maybe.” Hasso shrugged. He neither knew nor cared - and he didn’t want to go back and experiment. An Ivan with an evil temper would plug him if he did. He glanced over at Velona. No, he didn’t have the words yet ... but one of these days he would. In the meantime, he was stuck with the wizard. “Tell me about these Laws, then.”

“You truly do not know of the Laws?” Aderno asked, and Hasso shook his head. They happened to be riding past a Grenye farm. The Lenello wizard waved towards it. “Without them, without being able to use them, we would live like that.”

The farm put Hasso in mind of what he’d seen in Russia. If anything, it was even more backward, even more disorderly. The man of the family was chopping wood. Every few strokes, he would swig from a jug. Hasso wouldn’t have wanted to get lit up while swinging an axe, but the peasant didn’t seem to care. He paused to bow as the Lenelli went by, then attacked the wood with fresh ferocity. His wife was weeding in the vegetable plot by the shabby, thatch - roofed farmhouse. Her butt stuck up in the air. Aderno mimed swatting it. Hasso chuckled. He and his men had played those games with peasant women. Some of the gals liked it. Others ... Well, too bad for them. A swarm of children, from almost grown to barely past toddling, worked around the farm. A boy with a beard just starting to sprout tended a handful of pigs in a stinking muddy wallow. He also bowed to his overlords. Hasso didn’t like the look in his eye when he straightened. A girl a year or two younger tossed grain to some chickens. She might have been pretty if you fattened her up and scrubbed off a lifetime’s worth of dirt. Would anyone ever bother? Would it ever occur to anyone that he ought to bother? Hasso didn’t think so.

“You think these are bad, you should see the wild ones,” Aderno said. “These are partway civilized, or at least tamed. They know better than to yap at their betters, anyhow.”

Hasso wasn’t so sure of that. He cared for the way the peasant swung the axe no more than he liked the smoldering fury in the youth’s eyes. They might be cowed, but they seemed a long way from tame. And

... “Those bastards who were chasing Velona - they were wild?”

“Wild, yes,” Aderno answered. “Without magic. Without hope of magic. Too stupid, too mindblind, to harness the Laws of Similarity and Contagion.”

There. Hasso finally had names for the Two Laws. Names alone didn’t help much, though. “What do they mean?” he asked.

Aderno clucked like a mother hen. He really couldn’t believe Hasso didn’t know. Plainly giving him the benefit of the doubt, the wizard said, “Well, you’re still a stranger here.” He might have been reminding himself. “The Law of Similarity says that an image is similar to its model, and if you do something to the image, the same thing will happen to the model. Actually connecting them in a magical way is more complicated, but that’s the idea. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” Hasso said. Gypsies and other frauds used the same notions in the world he knew, but they didn’t really work there. Here... Well, who could say? What was he doing here if magic was nothing but a load of crap? “And the Law of, uh, Contagion?”

“An obvious truth: that things once in contact remain in contact - in a mystical sense, of course,” Aderno replied.

“Aber naturlich”
Hasso said dryly. And if that wasn’t real, pure, one hundred percent bullshit ... then maybe it was something else.