After the Downfall

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.