After the Downfall

King Bottero laughed when the wizard told him what the German’s words meant. “These are also my dogs,” the king said, waving toward the Grenye. “They will not bite.”

He seemed very sure of himself, and of his servants. Hasso glanced at the Grenye again. They went about their work with their heads down, and seemed to pay little more heed to the Lenelli than their masters did to them. But a certain slight stiffness in the way they moved made Hasso sure they understood Lenello, even if the Lenelli didn’t bother to understand them.

“Goddess on earth?” Hasso asked Velona, the Lenello words strange in his mouth.

They lay side by side on the bed of his small chamber in Castle Drammen. No matter what Velona was, he was only a new vassal of ambiguous rank. Chances were he got a chamber of his own only because she fancied him. Otherwise, he would have drawn a cot or a straw pallet in the common room with the belching, farting, snoring ordinary soldiers.

He wouldn’t have minded. He’d done that often enough. But this was much, much better.

The bed was small, too, which meant he and Velona touched even when they lay side by side. The tip of her breast just brushed the skin of his arm. She smelled of clean sweat and cinnamon. If she was a goddess, she was a very human one.

She nodded, which made shadows swoop across the promontories of her face. The only light in the room came from a lamp that sputtered and added the odor of hot mutton fat to the air. “That’s right,” she said.

“What does it mean?” Hasso asked the question a dozen times a day.

Velona looked surprised when he asked now. “What it says, of course.”

“What is that?” Things Hasso wanted to say bubbled up inside him: how in his world there were no goddesses on earth, or even gods; how God Himself seemed far away, if He was there at all; how the age of miracles, or the age when people believed in miracles, was long gone.

And yet a little miracle, or something a hell of a lot like one, had brought him here from burning Berlin. But even if the Fuhrer was as close to a god on earth as people knew in these grimly rational days, it would have taken more than a little miracle to save the Reich from the clutches of the Russian bear, the American eagle, and the British lion.

Speaking German, all that would have burst free in a torrent of words. In Lenello, he was limited to questions that made him sound like a Dummkopf. Sooner or later, he would understand more. He’d been through enough to teach him patience the hard way.

“You really don’t know.” Velona sounded amazed.

“I really don’t know.” Hasso hoped he got the conjugation right.

She laughed – not at him, he didn’t think. “The goddess lives in me,” she said, touching the inside of her left breast to show what she meant. “Sometimes I am Velona, sometimes I am the goddess, sometimes I am the goddess and Velona at the same time.” She spoke slowly and simply to give him a chance to understand.

“How to know – how I to know – which?” he asked.

He wondered if she would laugh again, but she didn’t. “When I ran out of Bucovin, the goddess filled me. I could not have run like that if she hadn’t. Those Grenye you saw chasing me, those weren’t the first ones who came after me. I left the others in the dust.”

“I understand,” he said after a bit. Her explanation wasn’t smooth. She backed and filled and used different words and gestured and sat up in bed and acted out what she meant. He never got tired of watching her. Goddess or Velona, she was the most alive person he’d ever met, and it wasn’t even close.

“Good!” Her eyes flashed brighter than the feeble rays from that smelly mutton – fat lamp should have let them do. “But even the goddess fills only a woman. Those churls would have caught me if you hadn’t – “ She imitated the noise from the Schmeisser again. She kissed him. “Thank you.”

“Happy. Glad.” Hasso drew her to him. “Big glad!” She laughed. Then he asked, “Make love with goddess? Or make love with Velona?”

“Oh, that was me,” she said, and pointed at herself to make sure he got it. “The goddess went out of me when I didn’t need her any more. That was one reason I was so worn there for a little while.” Again, she worked at what she was saying till she was sure he followed. She was a good teacher … and learning a language from a lover had incentives a tutor with a mustache and a tweed jacket couldn’t hope to match.

If the goddess possessed her some of the time, what was it like when possession ended? In his own world, he would have taken her talk for metaphor. Here? He kept an open mind. He’d seen enough strange things to make him unsure where metaphor left off and magic began. And if magic worked, why couldn’t there be a literal goddess?

No reason he could see, no reason at all.

“What about with King Bottero?” he asked. He hoped he didn’t sound too jealous. He didn’t feel too jealous, but he wasn’t altogether easy about it.