After the downfall Read online

  "So you know tricks, do you?" Orosei said. His gaze went here, there, everywhere. He wouldn't give himself away by eyeing his target before he went after it.

  Hasso shrugged. "Maybe a few."

  "Well, let's get on with it," Orosei said. "Nothing personal, you understand." I make my living squashing people. You're just another one.

  "Nothing personal," Hasso agreed. If I can beat you, I look like a big deal. You're in the way — like Poland.

  They circled warily. Hasso took it on faith that Orosei was good. The master-at-arms didn't seem inclined to take chances on anybody. Once things started happening, fights could — often did — end in seconds. Someone would make a mistake or just move an instant slower than he should have, and that would be that.

  "Did you come here to fight or to dance?" Orosei asked. In the middle of the question, without warning or even raising his voice, he sprang.

  The next few seconds were one of those frantic flurries that happened when two pros went at each other without any rules. One of Orosei's boots thudded into Hasso's chest — not quite in his solar plexus and not quite hard enough to break ribs. The Lenello's thumb didn't quite take out Hasso's left eye, either — and Hasso didn't think he quite broke it when he bent it back. He got in some licks of his own, too.

  They broke apart again. Orosei would sport a mouse under one eye, and he definitely had hurt that hand. He saluted Hasso Lenello — style, clenched fist over his heart. "You're good, all right," he said. "We can use you."

  "You are good, too." Hasso didn't like plodding through a language he barely spoke, but he had no choice.

  They circled some more. Hasso fired a kick at Orosei's knee. Orosei grabbed his foot and launched him, then jumped on him like a starving tiger. But Hasso had expected to get thrown, and greeted him with a boot in the belly. It was like kicking planks, but it got the master-at-arms off him.

  Orosei bounced to his feet. He saluted again, saying, "You're bloody good. Show me those flips I've heard about."

  "We go slow?" Hasso asked, and the master-at-arms nodded. Hasso knew a moment's relief that he'd proved himself without getting maimed and without wrecking the other guy, who was bound to have friends in high places. He said, "Come at me — not very fast."

  Orosei did. He made a perfect practice partner. Hasso grabbed his outthrust arm, twisted, got him on his hip, and flipped him over his shoulder. Orosei thudded down on his back with a big grin on his face. He sprang up. "That's good, by the goddess! Do it again!"

  Hasso sent him ass over teakettle a couple of more times at half speed, and then at something closer to full speed. Orosei was a glutton for getting things right. If he took some bruises doing it, he didn't care.

  "Let me try," he said when he thought he had it.

  "Half speed," Hasso said, and the master-at-arms nodded. Hasso approached. He extended his arm. Orosei twisted and flipped him smooth as could be. Hasso hadn't expected anything different — this guy was a pro.

  He proved what a pro he was a moment later. After he'd tossed Hasso around three or four times, he said, "That is the move, and it's very fine. What is the counter?"

  "Ah!" Now Hasso gave him a German — style salute. "Good question! Right question! I come half speed. You — " He mimed doing the flip. "You see."

  Some of the soldiers drifted off when they found that Hasso and Orosei weren't going to ruin each other for their entertainment. Others crowded closer to watch Hasso show the master-at-arms how not to get thrown. A lot of them wanted to try the moves themselves, on one another and on the men who really knew how to do them.

  "You're better than I am," Orosei said after a while. "I have to think about it, and you just do it."

  "Practice," Hasso said with another shrug. How many times had he done those flips? On the other hand… "Me and sword? Bad." He made a face to show how bad.

  "But you've got that fire-spitting pellet crossbow," Orosei said: a pretty good description of a Schmeisser from somebody who'd never heard of the Industrial Revolution. "Do all the soldiers where you come from carry those?" Orosei asked. When Hasso nodded, the master-at-arms winced. "You must kill each other before you get close enough for swords."

  "Mostly." Hasso nodded again. Orosei wasn't just a hardnose with quick reflexes. He had brains. That figured. He was more or less a regimental sergeant major, so he'd better not be a dummy — especially right under the king's eye.

  The Lenello tossed him a spearshaft with a bundle of rags at the end instead of a point. "You know what to do with this?"

  "Some," Hasso answered.

  "Let's see." Orosei took a practice pike, too, and did his best to stick Hasso like a pig. When Hasso showed he could handle himself, Orosei whacked him on the back. "Yeah, you're pretty decent. How come, when you don't know what to do with a blade?"

  As best Hasso could, he explained about bayonets. Then he said, "Wait, please," and hurried back to his chamber. He returned with his entrenching tool. "Fight with this, too." He demonstrated some of the unkind things you could do with the metal blade.

  Orosei watched with interest, then hefted the entrenching tool himself. "Nice little thing," he said with an appreciative nod. "You dig holes so the pellets don't dig holes in you?"

  "Yes," Hasso said. Orosei got it, all right.

  "And it's a fine close-in weapon, too," the master-at-arms said. "Handy to have both in the same package." He handed the entrenching tool back. Hasso was beaming as he took it. He and Orosei didn't have many words in common, but they spoke the same language anyway.

  By the time the summer solstice rolled around, Hasso could read and even write a bit. His progress amazed the lame, white-haired Lenello who taught him. But old Dastel was used to teaching people who'd never met letters before. Hasso understood the idea that each sign stood for one sound just fine. So what if the Lenelli used thirty-four characters? So what if they wrote from right to left like Semitic Untermenschen?. As soon as Hasso memorized which squiggle sounded like what, he could read as well as anybody — and better than most, because people here had a habit of muttering their words as they read them. His biggest problem was his limited vocabulary. Learning to read helped there, too. Words on a page didn't vanish into thin air the way spoken ones did.

  Pages were parchment or something like that. Words were written by hand, with reed pens or goose quills. No Gutenberg here, not yet. I could do that, too, Hasso thought. Or would the wizards get mad at me for unfair competition?

  As the longest day of the year drew close, anticipation built in Castle Dram — men and in the city surrounding it. In the castle, Grenye servants lugged casks of wine and barrels of beer up from the cellars. The cellarmaster, an immensely fat Lenello, kept a stern eye on things to make sure the casks and barrels didn't get broached too soon.

  More Grenye dug trenches in the courtyard and chopped wood to fill them and set up enormous spits to turn roasting carcasses above them. The swarthy little natives seemed as excited about the upcoming holiday as their overlords. Why not? They'd be able to get drunk and make pigs of themselves. They didn't get to do that very often.

  As the solstice approached, Hasso got drunk several times. He tried giving Velona hints that he wasn't happy. She had to know why; she was nobody's fool. But she affected not to understand, no doubt thinking that better than a raging brawl. And she showed no sign whatever that she didn't intend to lay King Bottero.

  Some of the Lenelli chased Grenye women more as the solstice neared. The big blond men seemed to do a bit of that all the time. The Grenye had a hard time saying no, and their menfolk took their lives in their hands if they presumed to challenge their superiors. The Lenelli had the power of law behind them, and the power of size, and the power of military training.

  And a good many Grenye women didn't want to say no. Hasso had seen that before, in France and in Russia. Losers' women were often easy. Sometimes they saw the other side's victorious soldiers as, literally, meal tickets. You could do better for yourself in a
n occupier's bed than in one where you slept all alone. Occupiers also had a kind of glamour because they were victorious, in stark contrast to your own worthless odds and sods who couldn't defend the country against them.

  Sometimes, also, people fell in love, and who'd been on which side to start with hardly seemed to matter. Those were the affairs that turned out best — and worst. They could lead to marriages, despite regulations. Or they could lead to disaster when a soldier got transferred or when somebody decided who was on which side counted after all.

  Hasso wondered what would happen if Velona caught him with a little dark Grenye. Actually, he didn't wonder. She would scream. She would break things. She would throw things. She would throw him — out.

  To him, her joining Bottero seemed as much a betrayal as that would have been. But she couldn't see it from his point of view. If he tried to tell a Catholic woman not to take communion, she'd spit in his eye. And Velona wasn't just a woman taking communion. She was a priestess giving communion, too. She was the deity for whom communion was given. No wonder she wouldn't listen to him. He could see that.

  He hated it anyway.

  Much good it did him. Horns and drums woke him at sunrise, welcoming the longest day of the year with a raucous racket. He hadn't got too smashed the night before. His head didn't hurt or anything. But he wasn't thrilled about rising with the birds — and he was, because he could hear them chirping somewhere not far enough away.

  The alleged music woke Velona up, too. Seeing her smile at him from a few centimeters away went a long way toward reconciling him to being awake. "Big day today!" she said, the way anyone back home might have on a holiday morning.

  "Yes." Hasso knew he sounded grumpy — hell, he sounded downright dismal — but he couldn't help it.

  Velona laughed and poked him. "I do know what's bothering you," she said, and then she made damn sure it wouldn't bother him for a while. Afterwards, she kissed him and asked, "There — is it better now?"

  "Yes." This time, he sounded happier about things. Velona kissed him again before she got out of bed. Even so, the real answer was yes and no.

  He had that whole long day to brood about her going off to Bottero's bedchamber.

  But it turned out to be even worse. Grenye servants set up a bed in the middle of the courtyard. They aren't going to — ? Hasso thought, scandalized.

  But they were. As sunset neared, an enormous crowd gathered around the bed, eating and drinking and talking and waiting expectantly. Bottero came out of the castle and pushed his way through. He was naked as the day he was born, but much bigger. "Goddess!" he boomed, standing by the bed. "I summon you, goddess!"

  Velona came out, too. The crowd cleared by itself for her. Her golden nakedness might well have been divine; it seemed to draw all the fading light to itself. "I come, your Majesty!" she answered. "I come!"

  They lay down on the bed together, right there in front of everybody. They did, and then she did, loudly. Hasso got very drunk.

  IV

  Hasso woke the next morning with a colossal hangover and an inferiority complex the headache did nothing to dispel. He'd figured Bottero would be big — large men usually were large all over. But that big? The king had to have a horse lurking somewhere not too far down his family tree. No wonder Velona didn't want to miss their date.

  She wasn't in bed with him. All things considered, that might have been just as well. He got out of bed, pulled the chamber pot out from under it, and took an enormous leak. Then he put on his clothes and went to the buttery for something to eat — and for something to drink, to dull the pounding between his ears.

  He wasn't the only one badly the worse for wear that morning. Passed — out Lenelli and Grenye sprawled together in the courtyard. The overlords and their subjects didn't show that kind of camaraderie when they were conscious. Men who were up and about moved slowly and carefully, as if afraid their heads would fall off if they hurried. Hasso knew just how they felt — he felt that way himself.

  A cook standing behind a bubbling pot of porridge was taking pulls at a mug of beer. Hasso pointed at the pot. "Give me some of that," he said. Then he pointed to the mug. "And give me some of that!"

  "Barrel's over there. Help yourself." The cook gestured with the ladle before filling a cheap earthenware bowl and plopping a horn spoon into it. "Here you go. Say, you're the foreigner who sleeps with the goddess most of the time, aren't you?"

  "That's right. What about it?" If this guy was going to tease him about sharing her with the king, Hasso aimed to clean his clock. He was feeling just rotten enough to welcome a fight.

  But the cook only grinned at him. "You're a lucky dog, you are. His Majesty gets your sloppy seconds."

  He'd been worrying about getting Bottero's. He hadn't even thought it worked the other way around, too. Not knowing what to say, he didn't say anything. He just went over to the beer barrel and dipped out a mug.

  The hair of the dog that bit him took the edge off his headache. The porridge — he thought it was barley, but it might have been oats — had bits of greasy, salty sausage in it. It helped coat his stomach and put some ballast in there. He got up and went back for a refill. He started feeling human again, but still wished he had some aspirin. Wish for the moon, too, he thought.

  He was almost done with the second bowl when King Bottero walked in. Along with everybody else sitting on the benches, Hasso jumped to his feet. He didn't hurl himself at the king's throat. Maybe the remains of a hangover had their uses after all.

  Bottero waved the warriors back to their seats. "As you were, men. As you were." He seemed careful not to talk too loud. Maybe he was feeling it from the night before, too.

  Feeling it or not, the first thing Bottero did was dip himself out a mug of beer and drain it. He filled it again before he went up to the cook for some porridge. Then he ambled over and sat down by Hasso.

  "Your Majesty," Hasso said unwillingly.

  "Morning," Bottero said. "Quite a night last night, eh? Do they have holidays like that in the land you come from?"

  "Well… no." Try as he would, the German couldn't imagine the Fuhrer playing the starring role in a fertility rite. Goring, on the other hand… Hasso swigged from his mug. The Reichsmarschall was too damn fat to do it as well as King Bottero had.

  The king's eyes were tracked with red, but shrewd all the same. "Didn't think so," he said. "Velona tells me you aren't too happy about the rite. I didn't do it to spite you. I don't go around stealing my men's women. But the rite… We need the rite. Enjoying it is part of the rite."

  "I understand, your Majesty." Hasso tried not to sound too stiff. The king was going out of his way to be decent. He could have just ordered this foreigner with the funny ideas knocked over the head. Hasso didn't think his skill at unarmed combat was keeping him breathing. Maybe the Schmeisser had something to do with it. More likely, Velona really was fond of him, and Bottero was stretching a point for her sake.

  "Hope so," the king said. "I don't want that kind of trouble. I don't need it." He drained the mug again. "What I need is another beer. Can I get you one?"

  Hasso started to tell him no thanks. Then he realized Bottero was honoring him by asking. You didn't turn your sovereign down, not if he needed to borrow your woman (who just happened to be his goddess) for a ritual, and not if he offered to dip you out a beer with his own big, meaty hand. "Thank you, your Majesty."

  That was the right answer. King Bottero heaved his bulk up off the bench and went over to the beer barrel. Everybody watched him when he moved. Some men had that ability to draw eyes. Hitler had far more of it than Bottero, but the king was a long way from going without. And everybody watched him fill two mugs and bring them both back with him. He set one in front of Hasso and raised the other. "Piss in the river," he said.

  "Piss in the river," Hasso echoed, and he also drank. Americans said, Mud in your eye. This was the same thing.

  People buzzed in the background. Hasso couldn't make out much of what
they were saying, but he didn't need to understand them. They'd be talking about how Bottero was going out of his way to show the weird foreigner favor, and about what that might mean. Courts were courts, whether they revolved around a general, a petty king, or a Fuhrer with a continent at his feet (or, not much later, at his throat).

  "Is it all right, then?" Bottero asked.

  In his mind's eye, Hasso saw the king piercing Velona, saw her face slack with pleasure in the fading twilight. It didn't make him happy, but it didn't make him want to murder the king, either. And in another three months, Bottero would be doing it again.

  Of course, in another three months Velona might have decided she was sick of the weird foreigner herself. In that case… Hasso supposed he would get drunk anyway, watching the king lay her and thinking he used to do the same.

  And a different question occurred to him: "What does the queen say?"

  Bottero blinked. His queen was a Valkyrie with a wrestler's build. Her name was Pola, and she was the daughter of the king whose realm lay just north of Bottero's. They didn't get on badly, but they sure hadn't married for love. She couldn't hold a candle to Velona — not even close.

  With a sour chuckle, Bottero said, "She knows we need the ritual. What can she do?"

  "I understand, your Majesty," Hasso said. "I feel the same."

  "Bucovin." King Bottero made a fist and slammed it down on the map spread out on the table in front of him. "By the goddess, we really are going to do something about Bucovin this time around. We've put up with the miserable place too long already."

  Blond heads bobbed up and down, Hasso's among them. He'd got invited to the meeting not because of his own rank but because Velona wanted him there with her. Otherwise, he would have been as welcome as… as a no-account Wehrmacht captain in the Fuhrer's bunker, he thought. Yes, the comparison was apt enough.

  Looking at a map like that, even a no-account Wehrmacht captain would have wanted to hang himself. How could you make war without decent maps? This one didn't have any kind of scale. It didn't have any kind of projection. As far as he could tell, the Lenelli had never heard of such things. This was just a rough sketch of the lands that centered on Drammen.