After the Downfall

Yawning and cursing in German, Hasso pulled on his trousers and walked to the door. He threw it open, then stopped in surprise. That wasn’t a dark little Bucovinan out there, but a blond taller than himself. And, he realized a heartbeat later, someone he knew, too.

“Scanno!” he exclaimed. “What the demon are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same question, buddy,” the Lenello from Drammen answered. “They wanted me to come here and talk some sense into your pointed head, that’s why I’m here. Nechemat’s cursed glad to get away from all the Lenelli, too.”

Nechemat, Hasso gathered, was Scanno’s Grenye wife or lover. The German had seen her but never met her. “But you’re a Lenello,” he pointed out.

“On the outside, sure.” Scanno breathed beer fumes into Hasso’s face. Whether in Drammen or Falticeni, he liked to drink. He liked to talk, too. “I don’t act like those dumb buggers, though. You think Grenye aren’t people just on account of they’re mindblind? Shit, I’m mindblind. Most Lenelli are. What’s the big deal?” He eyed Hasso with more shrewdness than the Wehrmacht officer would have thought he owned. “I hear you’re not. That could be a big deal. And you know other stuff, whatever the demon it is. So could that.”

“They tell you everything?” Hasso asked. “Back in Drammen, they tell you everything?”

“All kinds of crap goes on under Bottero’s big, pointy beak,” said Scanno, who had a big, pointy beak himself. “A little harder to slip away than it used to be – I bet that’s your fault, huh?”

“I suppose so.” Hasso hadn’t had time to do a really good job of training the Lenelli in security and counterespionage. If the likes of Scanno could beat his setup … He knew what that meant. Bottero’s men hadn’t had time to figure it all out and make it their own yet. They were doing it because he’d told them to, not because they saw all the benefits and ins and outs for themselves. Hasso made himself ask, “How is the king?”

Scanno laughed, a big, booming laugh that made the Bucovinan guards stare. “Well, it’s not like he invites me to the palace for roast duck and wine with sugar in it,” the Lenello renegade said. “If he knows who I am at all, he figures I’m that drunken stumblebum who’d sooner slum it with the Grenye than stick to my own kind. And he’s right, too.”

He said that even as the same thought formed in Hasso’s mind. If Scanno could see himself so clearly, the rest of what he said carried more weight.

“But anyway, Bottero’s not happy right now. I don’t need to eat his duck and drink his sugarwine to know that,” Scanno went on. “Any time one of the kings loses to Bucovin, he’s ready to spit nails. It’s embarrassing, that’s what it is. And he’s got to worry that his loving neighbors will jump on his back. He took a real licking this time. You took a licking. What’s this strike column I heard about?” Briefly, Hasso explained. Scanno grunted. “That’s pretty sly, all right. But it didn’t work this time.”

“No, it didn’t,” Hasso agreed. “So why do you throw in with the Grenye and not your own folk?”

“I like ‘em better,” Scanno answered. “I mean, pussy’s pussy – who cares if the hair on it’s yellow or brown? And the Grenye, they don’t brag and strut and carry on all the stinking time. They’re people you can get along with. Besides, isn’t it about time somebody gave the poor sorry cocksuckers a fair shake?”

Scanno bragged and strutted and carried on as much as any Lenello Hasso had ever known. Maybe he didn’t know himself so well as the German had thought he did. Or maybe his size and his noise – and his yellow hair – made him stand out more among the natives than he ever would among his own people. Maybe he liked that. If he did, well, so what? What did it mean? That he was human. Who wasn’t?

But that question had another answer, one it wouldn’t have had in Hasso’s old world. Scanno, plainly, had never gone to bed with Velona or anybody like her. True, the difference wasn’t that she was a blonde, not a brunette. The difference was the goddess.

Yes, and the other difference is that she wants you dead now, Hasso reminded himself. Details, details.

“Here – I’ve got another question for you,” Scanno said. “Were you at that place called – what the demon was the name of it? Muresh, that was it. The one where Bottero’s boys went hog wild?”

“Yes, I was there.”

“Did you play their games?”

“No.” Hasso didn’t say he’d seen such things before in Russia. He’d played those games then – the Ivans were enemies he hated, unlike the Bucovinans, who were foes merely in a professional sense. And the Russians had taken their revenge once the Red Army crossed the Reich’s borders. Oh, hadn’t they just?