After the Downfall

Back in Drammen, Hasso hadn’t especially missed baths. When you got into the field, when you stayed in the line for weeks at a time, you learned to do without getting clean. You stopped worrying about it. It was nice to have the chance to scrub the dirt off, though. Hasso grabbed it without hesitation.

He didn’t even have to get back into his dirty duds. Servants laid out some others that fit him, no doubt borrowed from one renegade or another. “Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all.”

“Not even a little bit,” Rautat agreed. He had on clean clothes, too. “Now I could do with chopped pork and garlic over millet. That’d fill up the hole in my belly – and some mead to wash it down, too.”

“Sounds pretty good,” Hasso said. Rautat leered at him. He even understood why. The underofficer’s meal was what the Lenelli would sneer at as native food. Hasso didn’t care, even if he wasn’t wild about garlic. Once you spent some time campaigning, you ate anything that didn’t eat you first. Either that or you starved. He did add, “I think beer goes better.”

“Suit yourself,” Rautat said magnanimously. “Let’s go get outside some.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Food brightened the way Hasso looked at the world. It always did. Some of the meals he remembered mostly fondly were, by any objective standard, pretty horrible. Half a kilo of part-burnt, part-raw horsemeat wouldn’t put the Ritz out of business any time soon. But when you’d had nothing but snow and a mouthful of kasha for three days before you stumbled over the carcass, it seemed like the best supper you’d ever had.

The Bucovinan meal wasn’t half bad, even if it wasn’t what Hasso would have ordered given a choice. He’d just emptied his mug of beer when an attendant came up to him and said, “Lord Zgomot wants to see you now that you’re done eating.”

“He tells you to wait till I finish?” Hasso asked. The man nodded. Hasso shook his head in amazement. A ruler who thought of things like that! What was this world coming to? The Wehrmacht officer got to his feet. He towered over the native, as he towered over all the natives here. “I am at his service, of course.”

“Congratulations, Hasso Pemsel,” Zgomot said.

Hasso bowed. “Thank you, Lord.” As usual, he found the throne room cold and drafty and badly lit. Zgomot’s throne looked like a dining-room chair smothered in gold leaf.

“You kept your promise. Your weapon did everything you claimed it would.” The Lord of Bucovin raised an eyebrow. “Do you have any notion of how unusual that is, Hasso Pemsel?”

How many people – renegades and Bucovinans alike – would have promised him and other Grenye rulers that they could drive back the Lenelli? How many of those snake-oil salesmen would have been talking through their hats? Just about all of them, or the big blonds wouldn’t have pushed forward as far as they had.

“What I say I can do, Lord, I can do,” Hasso answered stolidly.

“So it would seem,” Zgomot allowed. “If you knew how many of the others said the same thing, though…” His mouth tightened, likely at some unhappy memory. Then he brightened – as much as he ever did, anyhow. “And you did something else marvelous, too.”

“What’s that?” Hasso asked.

“You came back,” Zgomot said. “We trusted you. We had not a lot of choice, maybe, when you were showing us something so new and strange, but we did it, and you did not betray us.” He might have been a priest solemnly proclaiming a miracle.

Shame flooded through Hasso. He hoped the throne room was too dim to let the Lord of Bucovin see him blush. Yeah, he’d come back, but only because the Lenelli didn’t want him anymore. He wondered whether Bottero was wishing he’d given his soldiers different orders. And he wondered whether Velona wished she hadn’t lost her temper with him.

Maybe Bottero did wish he’d welcomed back the man from another world. Hasso couldn’t make himself believe Velona felt any different about him. Velona didn’t do things because they were expedient. She did them because she felt like doing them. She loved as she pleased – and she hated as she pleased, too.

“Here I am, all right,” Hasso said. Let the Lord of Bucovin make anything he pleased of that.

“Yes.” Zgomot actually smiled a smile that didn’t look cynical. That didn’t happen every day – nor every week, either. “And now that you are here again, what other things can you show us that will drive the Lenelli wild?”

“Well…” Hesitantly, in a mixture of Lenello and Bucovinan, Hasso explained what he hoped to do with catapults and flying pots of gunpowder.

“Interesting,” Zgomot said – which, from him, was better than wild enthusiasm from a lot of people Hasso knew. “But a catapult only shoots so far. It only shoots so fast. How do you keep the Lenello knights from charging up and murdering the crew while they put a new pot in the throwing arm and cut the fuse just so?”