After the Downfall

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?”

They rode. As they went along, Velona and Aderno got into a screaming row. Every so often, one of them would point Hasso’s way, so he figured they were arguing about him. Velona went on laughing, so he guessed she believed him, whether the wizard did or not. Hasso heard the words four million more than once. Maybe it would have been better if Aderno hadn’t asked him. Too late to worry about that, though.

Hasso wondered what the ordinary Lenello troopers thought. He couldn’t tell. Those proud faces might have been carved from stone for all they showed. SS recruiting posters with men like that on them would have pulled in twice the volunteers – or maybe none at all, since so many would have despaired of measuring up to that standard.

Still, men were men, horses were horses, pigs were pigs … and Aderno’s unicorn was a goddamn unicorn, and his magic was, without a doubt, real, live magic. Hasso didn’t know much about this world, but he knew it was different from his. And his was different from this one, and the people here seemed to have more trouble than he did working that out.