After the Downfall

“I don’t do anything for them. And I can never forget you. You know that.” Hasso didn’t answer all of the last question. He had to share Velona with the king. How could she get mad at him for somebody like Leneshul?

Maybe you couldn’t keep secrets in a dream. Whether he told her or not, she knew. And she didn’t like it for beans. “I am a goddess! I do what I have to do!” she cried. “You – you’re only a man! How dare you take some smelly little black-haired twat? How dare you?”

Much too late, he remembered she hadn’t wanted him sniffing around Grenye serving girls back in Drammen, either. What could he say? That he had no idea whether he’d ever get away from Falticeni? She should have been able to see it for herself. If she could, she didn’t care – she was playing the woman scorned right up to the hilt.

“Aderno!” she cried. “Center my power while I smite this wretch!”

Hasso was a wizard of sorts. An ordinary man might well not have escaped the goddess’ wrath. He could feel it building like heat lightning on a hot summer day in the southern Ukraine. How to flee? How to get away?

He screamed himself awake.

XVI

He must have done some impressive shrieking. Next thing he knew, three guards were in the room with him, each man with a sword in one hand and a torch in the other. Their shadows swooped around and behind them like something out of a scary movie. Nobody in this whole goddamn world knows what that means, Hasso thought miserably. Nobody but me.

“What happened?” the first guard asked.

“Why did you yell?” said the second.

“Did somebody try to do something to you?” asked the third.

“Don’t be stupid, Elyash,” the first guard said. “Nobody in here but him – and us. Anybody who wants to get at him has to come through us, right? Nobody did, right?”

It wasn’t necessarily so. Hasso wished it were. “Princess Drepteaza come see me?” he asked in his rudimentary Bucovinan.

The guards looked at one another. They didn’t want to bother her in the middle of the night. It wasn’t quite the raw fear that would have made flunkies hesitate before disturbing Velona. That could be dangerous in all kinds of ways, including physically. Drepteaza wouldn’t – couldn’t – blast you where you stood. That didn’t make the little swarthy men eager to wake her up.

But the second guard said, “That shriek he let out … Maybe we’d better. We can blame it on him.”

Hasso didn’t think he was supposed to catch that. He held his face still. Knowing more of the language than they thought he did couldn’t hurt. After a little more guttural wrangling, the trooper called Elyash went off to see if Drepteaza would come. One of the others used his torch to light a lamp for Hasso. Then they withdrew from the room, leaving him alone in the dim, flickering light.

He could have gone back to sleep … if he’d had the nerve. How many times during the war had he heard a bullet crack past him? More than he could count – he knew that. His scars spoke of times that hadn’t been misses, but he wasn’t thinking about those. He was thinking he might have dodged something worse than a bullet, something on the order of a 155mm shell. And, unlike a 155, it might still be waiting for him if he lay down and closed his eyes.

Will I ever be able to sleep again? he wondered. Soldiers on the Russian front always talked about sleeping with one eye open so the Ivans couldn’t sneak up and cut their throats. But what happened when somebody could sneak up on you from inside your own head? Hasso shivered. Nothing good, that was what.

“Velona,” he whispered sadly. Why couldn’t she understand about Leneshul, even a little bit? But the answer to that formed as fast as the question. Because she was who and what she was, that was why. She wouldn’t let a native girl upstage her, even if she wasn’t there to be upstaged.

What did they call using a woman to get information out of a prisoner? A honey trap. The Bucovinans could have been tearing his toenails out. They could still start any time they pleased, too. Bless them, the fools, they’d given him a woman instead. And he hadn’t even told Leneshul anything. He’d just used her as a nicely rounded sleeping pill to evade bad dreams.

The door opened. In came Drepteaza, her hair all awry and her face twisted from fighting against a yawn. “More trouble in the night?” she asked in Lenello.

“Ja,” Hasso said. She nodded; she’d come to understand that. He wished he could go on in German; even in Lenello, he couldn’t speak smoothly. But German, like memories of movies, was his alone here. Lenello, then: “Those dreams in the night – now I know what makes them.”

“And?” Drepteaza waited for him to tell her what she needed to know. The feeble lamplight left her eyes enormous.

“A wizard from Bottero’s kingdom sends to me in my sleep,” Hasso said.