After the Downfall (46 page)

Now that he had to talk, he felt tongue-tied. How long had it been since he really talked to a woman?

The last time you did with Velona,
he answered himself. But that wasn’t the same thing: they’d been lovers before they could talk to each other at all.

It had to be back before the war, then. After the fighting started, he’d sweet-talked French shopgirls and Russian peasants into bed with him, but that wasn’t the same, either. With them, as with the Grenye women here, he wasn’t doing anything but screwing. Life got complicated when you wanted more than that.

Well, if he chickened out now, he’d probably never get another chance with Drepteaza. Hell, if he chickened out now, he wouldn’t deserve another chance.
Faint heart never won fair lady.
The worst that could happen if she told him to get lost was ... he’d feel even more miserable than he already did. He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “I am no Lenello,” he declared. Was he getting it out in the open or just being clumsy? Damned if he knew.

“Yes, I’ve seen that,” Drepteaza agreed gravely. “When you first got here, I wasn’t sure what you were. Now I think you are what you say you are: a man from another world who joined the Lenelli because you found yourself among them - and because you looked like them.”

Hasso could have done without that last. But, when he saw three little dark men chasing one tall blond woman, what was he supposed to think? Had he seen three Lenelli chasing one Grenye woman - well, who could say what he would have done? Life wasn’t in the habit of letting you take it over. He made himself nod. “Yes, I look like. But am not.” He pointed at himself again.

“I told you, I know that,” Drepteaza replied. “It matters less than you think, I’m afraid. You still do look like one. I don’t see how I could want someone who looks like that.”

There it was, plain as a wet fish in the face. “You look like a Grenye,” Hasso said. “Doesn’t bother me.”

That surprised her - he could see as much. Her answering smile was sweet and sad. “Plenty of Lenelli have lain with Grenye women. Most men are less choosy than most women. When they want, they take whatever they can find.”

“For screwing, sure.” Speaking Bucovinan, Hasso had to be blunt, too. “If screwing all I want, I be happy with Leneshul and Gishte. More to life than just screwing, I think. Yes? No? Maybe?”

“Yes - sometimes,” Drepteaza said. “You flatter me, you know?” She had to explain what
flatter
meant. When Hasso nodded, she went on, “I don’t think a Lenello would waste his time talking like this. He would think I was his because he was a Lenello and I wasn’t.”

“Not a Lenello,” Hasso said one more time. He slipped an arm around her, drew her close to him, and kissed her.

She didn’t scream or beat him over the head or even try to get away. She just... didn’t kiss him back. If a one-sided kiss wasn’t the most useless thing in the world, Hasso had no idea what would be. He broke it off in a hurry.

“I’m sorry,” Drepteaza said, his hand still dead on her shoulder. “It isn’t there. I almost wish it were things might be simpler. But I won’t lie to you. Do you want me to leave you alone and have nothing to do with you from now on? Would that be easier for you? I’ll do it if you want.”

She would do almost anything if he wanted her to - except what he really wanted her to do. Lord Zgomot, dammit, wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. Hasso shook his head. “What difference does it make?” he said dully. As if in afterthought, he lifted his hand.

Drepteaza didn’t slide across the bench to put some distance between them. She sat where she was, confident he wouldn’t do anything more than he’d already done. He had no idea where to go from there. He didn’t see anything he could do or say that would make any difference. Muttering, he heaved himself to his feet and strode off.

“Hasso!” she called after him. “Hasso Pemsel!”

He kept walking. She said something no well-brought-up German woman would have imagined, let alone said. Was it aimed at him or at herself or at both of them at once? He didn’t know, and he told himself he didn’t care.

When he went back into the palace, he ran into Gishte - almost literally. She was carrying an armload of clean linens up a corridor. “Come with me,” he said.

“Right now?” She sounded surprised, and maybe a little annoyed, too - couldn’t he see she had other things to take care of?

But he nodded. “Right now.”

She sighed. “Men!” She went with him, though.

Back in his chamber, he did what he chose to do. When it was over, she got up and squatted over the chamber pot to free herself of as much of his seed as she could, put on her clothes, picked up the linens, and left. He lay there, no happier than he had been before he went into her.
You can’t get too much of what you don’t want.

Now he knew exactly how true that was. He sure as hell did. And what good did knowing do him? No good at all. He couldn’t think of one goddamn thing that did him any good at all.

“I think it is time for us to show the Lenelli what we have, time to show them they would do better to leave us alone,” Zgomot said.

“Whatever you want, Lord,” Hasso answered. Two days after Drepteaza turned him down, he still had trouble giving a damn about anything.

“All right, then.” By the Lord of Bucovin’s tone, he hoped it was all right, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure. Also by his tone, he hoped Hasso wouldn’t notice. What he said next explained why: “I shall send you to the west, Hasso Pemsel. This gunpowder is your ... stuff. You know more about it than we do. You will use it best against the enemy.”

“I do that,” Hasso agreed.
Will I do that? Or will I see whether Bottero and Velona
-
oh, Velona!
will take me back after all?
Lying in Velona’s arms, he would forget about Drepteaza. Lying in Velona’s arms could make you forget your own name - but you’d sure be happy while you were forgetting.

“Rautat and some of the others who have worked with you will go along,” Zgomot said. “They will learn from you and see how you do what you do. Then they will be able to do it for themselves.”

Did that mean,
Then we won’t need you anymore?
Maybe. Or maybe Lord Zgomot suspected Hasso knew more than he was telling. Hasso did, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if Zgomot suspected the native was one sharp cookie. The German was damn sure Zgomot meant,
Rautat and the others
will keep an eye on you.
It made sense from the Lord of Bucovin’s point of view. Hasso could be dangerous for Bucovin, or he could be dangerous to Bucovin.

He nodded now, as if blissfully unaware of everything Zgomot had to be worrying about. “Whatever you want, Lord,” he repeated. He wasn’t about to argue, not when Zgomot was letting him leave the palace, leave Falticeni, and get somewhere near the Lenelli once more.

The roads dried out enough for him to move with a wagon a few days later. The wagon carried jars full of gunpowder. He finally had fuses that worked well enough. Considerable experiment had shown that cord soaked in limewater and gunpowder did the job - better than anything else he’d found, anyhow.

“I want to see the Lenelli when things start going boom,” Rautat said as they left Falticeni. He and Hasso rode horses; Hasso wasn’t about to try to drive the wagon, an art about which he knew less than he did about Egyptian hieroglyphics. Rautat went on, “The noise will be plenty to scare them all by itself.”

“Once, maybe. Maybe even twice. After that? No,” Hasso said.

Catapults.
His thoughts came back to them again. The Lenelli - and the Bucovinans, imitating them as usual - used them as siege engines, but not as field artillery. He wondered whether the natives or the renegades in Falticeni could flange up something that could travel with an army and would let him fling jars of gunpowder two or three hundred meters. Load them with scrap metal and rocks along with the powder, the way he had with these, and they’d make pretty fair bombs. In the meantime... In the meantime, he’d have to lay mines and set them off with fuses. He whistled tunelessly. That might not be a whole lot of fun. How was he supposed to get away again afterwards?

Why didn’t you think of these things sooner?
he asked himself. One obvious way around the problem was to use an expendable Bucovinan to touch off the fuses. The poor son of a bitch would probably even think it was an honor. The natives hated the Lenelli the way ... Hasso didn’t like completing the thought, but he did:
the way the Russians hated us.
After Muresh and the calculated frightfulness of the winter attacks - and after years of similar things - the Bucovinans had their reasons for hate like that. And the Germans had given the Russians plenty of reasons of that sort, too. Looking back, Hasso could see it plain enough. Well, the Ivans got their revenge when the pendulum of war swung back toward the west.

Why am I helping this folk against that one, when I’m more at home over there?
Hasso wondered. Was that why the Omphalos stone brought him to this world? He had trouble seeing how it could be. Then the landscape started looking more familiar. “Somewhere not far from here, you catch me,” he said to Rautat.

“That’s right.” The Bucovinan nodded. “We’re only a little ways away from the battlefield. If you know how hard we worked to open up a gap in our line to make you aim your horses there without having it look like we wanted you to...”

“Nicely done,” Hasso said. “You fool the Lenelli. You fool me, too.”

Rautat grinned as if the idea were all his. But he said, “Lord Zgomot is a clever man. Better to use your own strength against you, he said.”

Hasso nodded. It was good strategy - if you could bring it off. Manstein had, when the Red Army charged west after Stalingrad and then got an unpleasant surprise. And the Russians had at Kursk the next summer, letting the
Wehrmacht
bleed itself white trying to bang through defenses tens of kilometers deep. Nobody in the other world would ever hear about Lord Zgomot’s ploy. Maybe nobody in this world would, either, not in any lasting way. The Lenelli did most of the writing here, and they were no fonder than anyone else of chronicling their own defeats.

But Hasso knew full well what Zgomot had done.
He messed up my life along with Bottero’s
campaign,
the German thought.

They came over the top of a low rise and started down the other side. Hasso started to laugh - it was that or pound his head against something. “You waited for us here,” he said. A few heads - skulls, now, pretty much - sat on poles, Lenello helmets atop them, as a memorial to the battle. The pits the Bucovinans had dug still yawned, unconcealed now. But the field had been efficiently plundered. Even the horses’ skeletons were gone. What had the natives done with them? Burned them and smashed them to powder for fertilizer, he supposed.

“Yes, we did,” Rautat said. “We were scared shitless. Blond bastards are bad enough anyway, and we didn’t know if the thunder thing would hit us again.”

“But you stood.” Hasso had to respect that.

The Bucovinan underofficer shrugged. “Can’t run all the time. Have to stand somewhere, or we lose.”

Sometimes you stood and you lost anyway. Hasso knew all about that, the hard way. So, no doubt, did Rautat. They rode on.

Bucovinans had reoccupied the keeps on both sides of the bridge over the Oltet. They’d torn out the makeshift planking the Lenelli put down to force the crossing and replaced it with new, stronger timbers. As the wagon jounced and rattled and banged across, Hasso was glad. If it went into the river, he would have to start over.

Or would that be so bad? It would give me the perfect excuse not to fight the Lenelli.
Then he got over onto the west bank of the Oltet, and into what was left of Muresh. New shanties had gone up since Bottero’s men sacked and plundered and raped and killed there, but plenty of devastation remained. The people stared without a word as a big blond rode through the place in the company of Bucovinans. Nobody threw anything at him, which was good.

But Hasso remembered what had happened the autumn before. Maybe there were reasons to fight the Lenelli after all.

Once they’d ridden out of Muresh, Hasso asked, “How far ahead are King Bottero’s men?” In Bucovinan, the question needed only two words. German often made compound words. Bucovinan revolved around them.

“We still have a ways to go,” Rautat answered - another two words. “They aren’t even where we fought the first battle last fall. Not a strike at the heart this time. More like taking away a hand and half an arm.”

Hasso nodded; he had the same impression of Bottero’s strategy. The Lenelli had got themselves a bloody nose when they charged ahead too fast. Now Bottero seemed to want a digestible piece of Bucovin. Once he had it, he’d go and take another bite, and then, no doubt, one more. That wasn’t how Hasso would have gone about things, which wasn’t the same as saying it wouldn’t work. The rule here seemed to be that the Lenelli moved forward and the Grenye gave ground before them. Sometimes they didn’t move forward very fast - sometimes the frontier stood still for years at a time. But they never seemed to move back.

Maybe I’ll fix that,
Hasso thought.
Yeah, maybe I will. And maybe I’ll do something else instead.
Who knows what the hell I can do if I set my mind to it?

He himself had no idea. That should have alarmed him. Sometimes it did. Sometimes he thought it was blackly funny.

When he came to the first battlefield, he wondered whether he ought to comb the ground for the cartridges his machine pistol spat out. Could wizards do something nefarious if they found one? For the life of him, he couldn’t see how, not when the Schmeisser would never work again.

“Do you know - did you know - a fellow named Berbec?” he asked suddenly. Rautat shook his head. Hasso asked the rest of the Bucovinans with him, but they didn’t know Berbec, either.

“Who is he?” Rautat asked. “Sounds like one of our names.”

“It is.” Hasso explained how he’d acquired the native on the field here. “I don’t know what happens to him after I get caught. Maybe he belongs to Velona now. I hope she treats him well.”