After the Downfall

“I don’t know,” Drepteaza answered with another of those disarming grins. “The goddess is real – that is plain. We believe Lavtrig and our other gods are real, too, though they are quieter in the way they poke the world with their fingers. Whether something larger lies behind all that – well, who can say? But the wicked do not triumph forever. Nothing can make me believe that.”

Then why did the Reds beat Germany? Hasso wondered. Why wouldn’t the USA and England see that Stalin was more dangerous than Hitler ever could be?

Maybe God was out having a few drinks with the Lenello goddess and the Bucovinan gods. That made as much, or as little, sense to Hasso as anything else. He spread his hands. “I have no answers, priestess.”

“You would scare me if you said you did,” Drepteaza said. “You would scare me worse if you made me believe you.” She eyed him. “More than most people, you would make me wonder if you did say something like that.”

“Me? All I’m trying to do here is stay alive,” Hasso said.

“You’ve seen another world. You must have had a god – or maybe gods – of your own there.”

“Ja. I was just thinking about Him, in fact. He doesn’t answer.”

“Then why are you here now?”

He shrugged. It was a damn good question. But, again … “I don’t know.” Did the Omphalos have anything to do with the God Who was also Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? The ancient Greeks wouldn’t have said so. Whether they were right – again, Hasso didn’t know.

Drepteaza didn’t want to leave it alone. “And,” she continued, “you spent all that time with the goddess on earth. If you don’t know more about such things than most people, who does?”

“I know a good bit about Velona – what a lover can know in the time we were together. A lover who has to learn a language first, I mean.” Hasso corrected himself. “About the goddess … All I know about the goddess is that she frightens me. She’s… bigger than I am.”

“Well, yes,” Drepteaza said. “Of course. That’s what makes her a goddess. Whether she’s big enough to eat Bucovin … She thinks she is. So far, she’s proved wrong, but she keeps trying.”

Thinking you were bigger than you really were was one of the worst mistakes you could make. Not even Hitler could argue with that, not any more. If you got into a war with the two biggest countries with the two strongest economies in the world – mm, chances were you wouldn’t be happy with the way things turned out. And chances were Hitler wasn’t, if he was still alive.

“Is that all you need to be a god?” Hasso asked. “To be strong?” He hadn’t thought about it in those terms before. Back in his own world, he’d taken for granted the answers other people gave him. He had more trouble doing that here, because he was hearing different things from different people.

Maybe they’re all wrong, he thought. But how can I know? How do I make up my mind? He’d never imagined there could be such a thing as too much freedom, but maybe there was.

And Drepteaza looked at him in surprise. “What else is there, Hasso Pemsel?”

Another alarmingly keen question. Hitler and Stalin ruled their countries as virtual gods because they were strong. Some people would say one of them was good and some the other, but who would say they both were? Nobody. Maybe it was true for beings genuinely supernatural, too. Why wouldn’t it be?

One reason occurred to him. “A god should be good, too, yes?” That, to him, needed to count more for real gods than for the self-made variety.

“What is good?” Drepteaza asked, and, like Pilate asking about truth, she didn’t wait around for the answer.

Reports about the Lenello raiders came back from the west. They plundered and killed, and then they withdrew. How much Bucovinan harassment had to do with that, Hasso couldn’t tell. He couldn’t tell how much good his gunpowder would have done, either.

He took another lover, a woman named Gishte. He didn’t think she was any more excited about him than Leneshul was, but she was more polite about it. That would do – for a while, anyhow.

He made damn sure he never took another bath with Drepteaza. It wouldn’t have meant anything to her. That wasn’t the point. It would have meant much too much to him. As things were, he played back memories of her nakedness as if he’d been a frontline Signal cameraman filming it on the spot.

All sorts of crazy thoughts went through his head. What would happen if he got enough gunpowder to blow up the castle here? Falticeni and Bucovin would never be the same. Of course, he would also blow himself up, and he didn’t want to do that. If he were suicidal, he never would have sat on the Omphalos. He would have fought on till he got killed. It probably wouldn’t have taken long.