After the Downfall

“No, I wasn’t kidding,” Hasso agreed. Why had the other man wondered if he was? Because he’d never seen anything like this, that was why. Hasso understood as much. Well, now the native hadn’t just seen it – he’d felt it. And he was a believer.

Everybody except the wounded man walked out into the meadow to see what was left of the shell. What was left was about what Hasso had expected: some sharp, twisted shards of bronze casing, and not much more.

“Lavtrig! Every time you throw one of these metal balls, you waste it.” The smith who’d stayed behind at the estate sounded appalled.

“Not waste.” Hasso shook his head. “We hurt the enemy with it.”

“But you can’t use it again,” the smith said. “The metal flies once, and it’s gone.

Gone for good. Metal isn’t cheap, you know.”

“Neither is losing a war,” Hasso pointed out once more. “You want your smithy burned? You want to get killed? You want your daughter raped and killed? You want another Muresh?”

“Of course not,” the Bucovinan answered. “But I don’t want to go bankrupt, either. We could win the war and throw all our metal away. Then where would we be? Does Lord Zgomot really know this is how things are?”

“Yes,” Hasso said, a one-word reply that made the smith blink.

“Hasso is right. We have to do this. Lord Zgomot says so, and I think he is right, too,” Drepteaza said. “The other choice is giving up more land and more people to the Lenelli. Do you want that?”

“No, priestess,” the smith answered. He would argue with Hasso. The German was just… a foreigner. But he wouldn’t argue with Drepteaza. He assumed she knew what she was talking about because she was a priestess.

Well, Drepteaza commonly did know what she was talking about. But that was because she was Drepteaza, not because she was a priestess. Hasso understood as much. He thought Drepteaza did, too, which was a measure of her good sense. The smith, by contrast, had not a clue.

“Shall we send off another one?” Rautat asked.

“Maybe not right now,” Hasso said. “First we make sure our wounded can do what they need to do.”

“I’m all right,” the injured catapult man said.

“It can wait. It should wait,” Hasso said. “One thing at a time.”

“Suits me – and not because of my leg,” the catapult man said, wrinkling his nose. “Smells like demon farts around here.”

“How do you know what demon farts smell like?” That wasn’t Hasso, even if he had the thought. It was Drepteaza.

“Well, I don’t, not really,” the native soldier admitted. “But it smells like what I think demon farts ought to smell like.”

“Does it smell that way to you, too, Hasso?” Drepteaza asked.

He shook his head. “It reminds me of fireworks.” The key word came out in German. He had to explain what fireworks were, starting just about from scratch – the Bucovinans had no idea. “They can light up the sky with flames of different colors,” he finished. “Best at night, of course.”

“How do you make flames different colors?” Rautat asked. “Flames are flames, right?”

Hasso didn’t know how pyrotechnic engineers did what they did. But Drepteaza said, “Haven’t you seen how salt makes a flame yellower?”

“Bits of copper or copper ore can turn flames green,” the smith added.

“You should know that, Rautat,” Hasso said. “You were a smith.”

“An ironsmith, not a coppersmith or bronzesmith,” Rautat said. “That’s why I went to learn Lenello tricks. Iron is the coming thing. I wanted to see what the blond bastards knew that we don’t.”

The coming thing. Hasso hid his smile. Rautat wasn’t wrong, not for the way things were in Bucovin. And if iron had come to Germany a couple of thousand years earlier … well, so what? Hasso damn well wasn’t in Germany any more, and he never would be again. A damn good thing, too. He was better off here. There he would have got killed. Or, if he was very lucky – or maybe very unlucky – he would have ended up a Russian POW.

He supposed he was still a Bucovinan POW. But the Ivans wouldn’t have hurt any V-2 engineers they caught. They needed what those fellows knew. The Bucovinans needed what Hasso knew. If good treatment was the price of getting it, they were willing to pay. The Reds were probably doing the same for their German engineers. Come to that, the Amis were bound to be acting the same way.

Love got stale or flamed out. No one knew that better than Hasso these days. Common interests, on the other hand, could last. They’d better, the Wehrmacht officer thought. If they didn’t, he was dead.

Without the least bit of warning, flat-footed, Drepteaza tried to kick Hasso in the crotch. He sprang back out of danger – one of the rules when they trained together was that you had to be alert every second. She’d never actually got him in the balls. Bruises on his hip and thigh where he’d had to twist away instead of jumping back said she’d come close more than once.

She looked disappointed that she hadn’t made him sing soprano this time. “What did I do wrong?” she asked.