After the Downfall

“Hope so,” the king said. “I don’t want that kind of trouble. I don’t need it.” He drained the mug again. “What I need is another beer. Can I get you one?”

Hasso started to tell him no thanks. Then he realized Bottero was honoring him by asking. You didn’t turn your sovereign down, not if he needed to borrow your woman (who just happened to be his goddess) for a ritual, and not if he offered to dip you out a beer with his own big, meaty hand. “Thank you, your Majesty.”

That was the right answer. King Bottero heaved his bulk up off the bench and went over to the beer barrel. Everybody watched him when he moved. Some men had that ability to draw eyes. Hitler had far more of it than Bottero, but the king was a long way from going without. And everybody watched him fill two mugs and bring them both back with him. He set one in front of Hasso and raised the other. “Piss in the river,” he said.

“Piss in the river,” Hasso echoed, and he also drank. Americans said, Mud in your eye. This was the same thing.

People buzzed in the background. Hasso couldn’t make out much of what they were saying, but he didn’t need to understand them. They’d be talking about how Bottero was going out of his way to show the weird foreigner favor, and about what that might mean. Courts were courts, whether they revolved around a general, a petty king, or a Fuhrer with a continent at his feet (or, not much later, at his throat).

“Is it all right, then?” Bottero asked.

In his mind’s eye, Hasso saw the king piercing Velona, saw her face slack with pleasure in the fading twilight. It didn’t make him happy, but it didn’t make him want to murder the king, either. And in another three months, Bottero would be doing it again.

Of course, in another three months Velona might have decided she was sick of the weird foreigner herself. In that case … Hasso supposed he would get drunk anyway, watching the king lay her and thinking he used to do the same.

And a different question occurred to him: “What does the queen say?”

Bottero blinked. His queen was a Valkyrie with a wrestler’s build. Her name was Pola, and she was the daughter of the king whose realm lay just north of Bottero’s. They didn’t get on badly, but they sure hadn’t married for love. She couldn’t hold a candle to Velona – not even close.

With a sour chuckle, Bottero said, “She knows we need the ritual. What can she do?”

“I understand, your Majesty,” Hasso said. “I feel the same.”

“Bucovin.” King Bottero made a fist and slammed it down on the map spread out on the table in front of him. “By the goddess, we really are going to do something about Bucovin this time around. We’ve put up with the miserable place too long already.”

Blond heads bobbed up and down, Hasso’s among them. He’d got invited to the meeting not because of his own rank but because Velona wanted him there with her. Otherwise, he would have been as welcome as … as a no-account Wehrmacht captain in the Fuhrer’s bunker, he thought. Yes, the comparison was apt enough.

Looking at a map like that, even a no-account Wehrmacht captain would have wanted to hang himself. How could you make war without decent maps? This one didn’t have any kind of scale. It didn’t have any kind of projection. As far as he could tell, the Lenelli had never heard of such things. This was just a rough sketch of the lands that centered on Drammen.

There was the marsh where Hasso had come into this world, pictured with a stippling of dots. There was the road on the causeway – at least, he presumed that was what the thin, straight red line meant. And there was Bucovin, to the east. The capital was a place called Falticeni; Hasso sounded it out a syllable at a time. Lenello used one character for a sound that needed four in German. Had Hasso been writing it, he would have spelled it Faltitscheni.

One of Bottero’s marshals stabbed a forefinger at the place. He was a middle-aged fellow named Lugo. By local standards, he was short – about Hasso’s height. But he was almost twice as wide through the shoulders. If you hit him and he decided to notice, he’d rip your spleen out.

“We’ll burn it and sow salt so nothing grows there again,” he rumbled, his voice half an octave lower than even the king’s basso.

A Grenye servant came in, set a tray full of mugs of beer and wine and a plate of sausages baked in dough – a local delicacy – on the table, and then strolled out again. Hasso pointed to him as he went and asked, “Why he listen?”

“Who? Sfintu? What’s wrong with Sfintu?” Bottero asked, genuine puzzlement in his voice.

Hasso wanted to bang his head against the wall. They’d never heard of security. They didn’t even suspect they’d never heard of it. How to spell things out in words of one syllable, especially when words of one syllable were almost the only kind he knew?