After the downfall Read online

  "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.

  "Little by little, we use our magic — and our strong right arms — to teach the Grenye that even dreaming of standing against us is far beyond their feeble abilities," Aderno said. "Sooner or later, they will learn."

  "That would probably be good," Hasso said. All the same, he wished he had eyes in the back of his head, a wish he'd also had many times in Russia. The squat, dark men who'd been chasing Velona hadn't learned their lesson yet — he was sure of that. And, thanks to his Schmeisser, they never would now.

  Later that afternoon, they stopped in a peasant village. It reminded Hasso too much of the hamlets he'd gone through in the Soviet Union. Oh, the details were different. And it wasn't just that modern things were missing: no phone poles, no electric wires, no radios, no tractors or beat — up cars. The huts, of wattle and daub or of stones chinked with mud, didn't look much like their Russian counterparts. And the Grenye looked more like gypsies or Jews than Slavic peasants.

  But the air of rundown despair pervading the place could have come straight from the USSR. Much the biggest and finest building in the village was the tavern. Four or five men sprawled in drunken stupor near the entrance. A tipsy man staggered out singing something Hasso couldn't understand. It sounded like a dirge, though. Another man with a pinched, worried face scuttled in. If he wasn't on his way to drown his sorrows, Hasso had never seen anybody who was.

  All the Grenye who could stay on their feet bowed to the Lenelli. Across the road from the tavern stood a smithy. The front was open to the air, the better to let smoke and heat escape. The smith wasn't very tall, but Hasso wouldn't have wanted to tangle with him — he was a mass of muscle. Heavy hammer in his right hand, leather apron and gauntlets warding him from sparks, he too bent double as his overlords rode past. What he thought while he did it… was perhaps better not contemplated.

  "What would happen if we went into the tavern?" Hasso asked Aderno.

  "The tapman would serve us," the wizard answered. "If he thought we weren't looking, he might spit in the beer. If he really thought we weren't looking, he might piss in it. But he would serve us."

  "Is there any way you could make the Grenye like you?" the German asked, recalling Russia again.

  Now Aderno laughed in his face. "Certainly, outlander. We could fall over dead right here. We could come down with a plague that makes the flesh drip off our bones. We could burst into flames. An earthquake could make the ground open up and swallow every last one of us. The Grenye would like us fine… after that."

  "Why do they feel that way about you?" Hasso knew why the Russians felt that way about his own folk. The Germans in the USSR had earned such feelings, since they felt the same way about Slavs — and acted like it. And now Stalin's hordes were avenging themselves inside the Reich, something Hitler surely never imagined when he hurled the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS at the Soviet Union in 1941.

  "They're only Grenye," Aderno said. "Who cares why they feel the way they do? It doesn't matter, not even a counterfeit copper's worth."

  Plainly, he thought Hasso was wasting his time with such questions. The Wehrmacht officer tried one more: "How long have you ruled them here?"

  "A couple of hundred years — something like that," Aderno answered. "Velona would know better than I do. Long enough to teach them they can't beat us. That matters. Who's strong and who isn't: once you know that, you know everything you need to know. I dare you to tell me it's any different in your world."

  "Well… no," Hasso said. "The answers aren't always what you want, though."

  "They have been for us," Aderno said.
Remembering the grinding German retreat across Eastern Europe, remembering the doomed last stand in Berlin, Hasso envied the Lenello his certainty.

  Instead of stopping in the Grenye village, the travelers rode on till they came to another Lenello garrison. Castle Kalmar was as close to identical to Castle Svarag as made no difference. Even the commandant might have been Mertois' first cousin. He was deferential to Aderno and even more so to Velona. Because they vouched for Hasso, the commandant also treated him with tolerable respect.

  Velona got the best guestroom in Castle Kalmar. Aderno's, down the hall, was only half as big. Hasso wasn't sure whether the Lenelli here thought he was Velona's aide or her lover or her pet. For that matter, he wasn't sure what she thought herself.

  Her lover he certainly was. He'd never even dreamt of a woman like her before, brazen as a man, strong as a man, pretty in a way that made every movie star and chorus girl he'd ever seen seem insipid beside her. If you could trap fire and high explosives inside a sweetly curved skin, that was Velona. And she gave herself to him — and took from him — without the slightest reservation.

  Heart slowing in the afterglow, he asked her, "Why?" There was another Lenello word he'd picked up.

  "Why what?" Velona asked, her candied mouth only a few centimeters from his.

  "Why — this?" Hasso's wave encompassed everything from Castle Kalmar as a whole to her naked thigh still splayed over his. She smiled when his hand came to rest there. He smiled, too, but at the same time he marveled at the firm power of the muscles under his fingers.

  "Why not?" she answered, which annoyed him more than it helped. Then she said something else, too fast and complicated for him to follow. He shrugged. She tried again, more slowly this time. He caught Aderno's name and a couple of other words. She was asking if he wanted the wizard to translate.

  He shook his head, started to realize how very little he wanted that. "No, dammit. I need to talk to you," he said in German. He couldn't put that into her language yet. He pointed at her to get the idea across even without words she could understand.

  She grabbed his hand and set it on her breast. It tightened automatically. Her nipple stiffened. Her breath sighed out. She kissed him. Things went on from there. They didn't talk, which didn't mean they didn't communicate. You could say an amazing number of things with touches and caresses and sighs. Maybe the things you said that way mattered more than the ones that needed words.

  But Hasso was stubborn. After they gasped their way to a second completion, Velona turned her back on him and started to breathe deeply and regularly. She even fell asleep afterwards like a man. Hasso asked, "Why — this?" again.

  She swung toward him again. "Because it feels good. Because I like it. Because I like you," she said, using gestures to eke out the words. Then she said something else. He wasn't sure whether it was, "Are you happy?" or, "Are you satisfied?"

  He was still too perplexed to be perfectly happy. He couldn't deny he was satisfied, though. He mimed limp, boneless exhaustion. Velona laughed and poked him in the ribs. Then she rolled back onto her other side. He got the unmistakable impression she wouldn't be happy if he bothered her again.

  So he didn't. He listened to her fall asleep instead. It didn't take long. And it didn't take long for his own eyes to slide shut, either.

  When he woke the next morning, his legs ached. He moved like an arthritic chimpanzee. His thighs weren't hardened to riding. Velona quickly figured out what was wrong with him, and he learned how to say saddlesore in Lenello.

  Breakfast was smoked sausage, hard bread, cheese, onions, and sour beer. Hasso missed coffee or tea or even the nasty ersatz products Germany had used since the start of the war. He tried to explain what they were like to Aderno, and ran into a blank wall of incomprehension.

  "We make hot infusions from leaves and roots to fight fevers or ease toothache or soothe a sour stomach," the wizard said. "Is that what you mean?"

  "Well, no," Hasso answered with a mournful sigh. He would have missed his morning jolt of energy even more if he hadn't had to do without it as shortages squeezed the Reich. Beer was all right in its way, but it didn't pry his eyelids apart like a big, steaming cup of coffee.

  "If you can conjure some out of the world from which you came, we might be able to use the Law of Similarity to make more for you," Aderno said.

  "Fat chance," Hasso said. "I'm no wizard."

  "You may not have the training, but the power lies within you." Aderno sketched the sign he'd used when he first came to Castle Svarag. Again, it glowed gold in the air between them. "You saw that?" Aderno asked. Hasso nodded. The wizard set a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "Yes, the power is there. That is what seeing — especially seeing gold — means. You are no mindblind savage like these." Aderno pointed to a couple of Grenye dumping garbage on the midden. He might have been talking about a yoke of oxen.

  "It may be there, but I don't know how to use it. Even if I did, could I reach back into my old world, like that?" Hasso asked.

  "I don't know," Aderno admitted. "If your world is so inimical to sorcery, maybe not. Maybe a wizard in the capital will have a better notion than I do." He shook his head. "He may have a better notion. There aren't many wizards, even among us. Whether any of them will know of your world and what it is like… well, who can say?"

  The commandant at Castle Kalmar gave the travelers fresh horses to speed them on their way. Hasso took that as a mixed blessing; he'd started getting used to the animal he was riding. His new mount seemed more spirited, which was the last thing he wanted. Trucks and cars didn't vary so much.

  He found out that Drammen, the name of the capital, meant something like high and mighty in the Lenello language. Aderno was ready to go on and on about the place, but Hasso didn't want to listen to him. He tried his few words of Lenello with Velona instead. He might not follow her, but he enjoyed trying.

  She used gestures to show him Drammen was big, and opened and closed her hand many times to show him it was populous. "How many people?" he asked. When they stopped, he drew in the dirt with a stick to show her he understood the idea of written numbers. To show one was easy. Five and ten weren't hard, and fifty and a hundred just took patience.

  Velona got excited when she saw what he was doing. She called Aderno over. The wizard was chewing on something; the peppery fumes he breathed into Hasso's face proved it was a chunk of sausage. "Well, well," he said, examining the numbers. "Those aren't what we use, but you'll follow ours, all right."

  To the Lenelli, one was a horizontal slash. Ten looked like a plus sign. A hundred was a square with a horizontal line through the middle. If you put the symbol for three — three horizontal slashes piled on one another — to the left of the symbol for ten, it meant thirty. If you put it to the right of the symbol for ten, it meant thirteen. The Lenelli didn't use a zero. The system struck Hasso as better than Roman numerals, not as good as Arabic.

  To show him how many people Drammen held, Aderno needed to teach him one more symbol: a square divided into quarters by vertical and horizontal lines. The wizard seemed impressed when he didn't boggle at the idea of a thousand.

  Drammen, by what Aderno wrote, held somewhere between thirty and forty thousand people.

  With a patronizing smile, Aderno asked, "And how many people in the town you come from, Hasso Pemsel?"

  Hasso had to think about his answer. He took the stick from the wizard and wrote the symbol for four and the symbol for a thousand. Aderno's smile got wider. Then Hasso wrote the symbol for a thousand again, to the right of the first quartered square.

  Velona blinked. Aderno stopped smiling. "No, that can't be right," he said impatiently. "You have written the numbers for four thousand thousand — we would say four million. But that is obviously impossible."

  "Four million, ja," Hasso said. "That's about how many people there are in Berlin." At least till the Russians get through with it, he thought glumly. God only knows how many they'll leave alive.

  "You
can't expect me to believe you," Aderno said.

  "You asked me. Now you don't like the answer," Hasso said.

  "Only a madman would like it," the wizard insisted. "No one could keep four million people fed. The idea is ridiculous. Even if by some miracle you could, their filth would pile up in mountains. You must be lying."

  Hasso swung the Schmeisser's muzzle toward him. "What did you say?" he asked softly. "You may want to think about what comes out of your mouth."

  Aderno had the courage of his convictions. "Do not act as if your honor is threatened if I challenge a clear lie," he said. "It will only make you look more foolish when I use the truth spell."

  "Ah, the truth spell. I forgot about that," Hasso said. "Yes, go ahead."

  "You really are a crazy man, outlander. If you want to prove it to the world, if you want to prove it to the woman who has taken a fancy to you… well, we can do that." Aderno aimed a long, lean wizardly forefinger at him. "Tell me again how many people live in this town of yours."

  "About four million," Hasso answered stolidly.

  The wizard sketched a star in the air between them. It glowed green. Velona clapped her hands together and laughed out loud. Aderno look as if someone had stuck a knife in him. "But it can't be!" he protested — to whom, Hasso wasn't sure. Most likely to the ghost of his own assumptions.

  "You can apologize now," Hasso said. Or you can kiss my ass. I don't much care which.

  Aderno had the air of a man who'd put out his foot for a step that wasn't there and fallen five meters. "I think I would rather believe you can fool the truth spell than believe in a city with four thousand thousand people in it," he muttered.

  "Believe whatever you please," Hasso said. "You asked me, so I told you. If you don't like it, it's no skin off my nose. You wanted to brag about how wonderful Drammen is, and you got a surprise. Shall we ride now?"