After the Downfall

A moat surrounded the gray stone outer walls. Soldiers on the walkway atop the outwalls surveyed the city between chest – high crenellations. Hasso had seen the towers of the keep even from outside the city walls. A red flag floated from the tallest of them. His lips quirked in a mirthless smile. He couldn’t hold that banner against the Lenelli, even if he’d been fighting one very much like it for almost four years. Yeah, artillery could have breached the walls and knocked down the towers in jig time. But he wouldn’t have wanted to try taking the place without it.

They rode down the avenue. It wasn’t the same as parading under the Brandenburg Gate after France fell. It really wasn’t the same as parading under the Brandenburg Gate would have been after Russia fell. Hasso feared only the Red Army was parading through Berlin these days. Was anything left of the Brandenburg Gate?

He shrugged. He’d never know. And a glance at his comrades said they all thought approaching the royal palace was a pretty big deal. Even Aderno looked like a second lieutenant about to get the Knight’s Cross straight from the Fuhrer himself.

What would happen to Hitler with Berlin falling? Hasso tried to imagine him in Russian captivity. The picture didn’t want to form. The Fuhrer would do anything, anything at all, before he let himself turn into Stalin’s plaything. Why couldn’t England and the USA see that, if Germany went down, the last dam against the spread of Bolshevism fell? It was as if they thought the Reich even worse, which struck him as insane.

He shrugged again. He would never know the answer there. As soon as his backside touched the Omphalos, he’d put his own world behind him forever. He didn’t have many answers here, either, but he could hope he would one of these days.

Velona caught his eye and winked. She blew him a kiss. “You will see the king. He will like you.” She made it sound simple and inevitable. She didn’t seem so overawed as the wizard and the troopers.

If you can keep your head when all those about you are losing theirs … chances are you don’t understand the situation. Hasso knew too well that he didn’t.

He found out how much he didn’t understand in short order. Another man – another wizard? – rode a unicorn up to the guards at the outer end of the drawbridge just ahead of the group of which the Wehrmacht officer was a part. The guards talked with him for a moment, then stood aside and let him through.

Then Hasso’s group approached. When the guards saw them, they stiffened to attention and saluted. Then they bowed themselves almost double, and then, straightening, they saluted again. They bawled out some sort of honorific or another – Hasso didn’t understand it, but he heard the fervor with which they shouted it. SS troopers yelled, “Heil Hitler!” the same way.

The fuss wasn’t for Hasso. Nobody at the castle knew him from the man in the moon. It wasn’t for Aderno. Hasso had figured out the wizard’s place in the scheme of things: he was hired help. He was high – class hired help, entitled to some respect, like a first-rate dentist back in the Reich. But nobody jumped through hoops for a dentist there, and nobody was likely to jump through hoops for Aderno here. The mounted soldiers? They were exactly what they looked like – muscle, nothing else.

No. The guards were having conniptions because Velona was back. She said something to them, then pointed toward Hasso. As soon as she did that, they saluted him, too.

Uneasily, he returned the salute. “Hello. Good day,” he said, a couple of phrases in Lenello that couldn’t land him in too much trouble.

“Good day,” they chorused, and then something he didn’t understand.

“What does that mean?” he asked Aderno. He wanted to learn Lenello on his own. If he had the wizard magically translating for him, he wouldn’t. And he didn’t like Aderno all that much, and he didn’t think Aderno fancied him, either. Put all that together and he didn’t want much to do with the wizard. Once in a while, though, he needed a shortcut.

“They said, ‘Good day, savior of the priestess!’” Aderno told him.

“Priestess?” Hasso hadn’t known she was one. He chuckled. No nun he’d ever heard of would have said thank – you the way she did.

“Priestess, yes.” But Aderno didn’t seem quite happy with the German equivalent Hasso offered for what he said. “You might also think of her as the goddess on earth.”

Hasso glanced over at Velona. She smiled and fluttered her fingers at him. Priestess? Goddess on earth? What the hell have I got into? he wondered. But he liked what he’d got into just fine. Along with Velona and the escort, he rode across the drawbridge and into Castle Drammen.

III