After the Downfall

God wills it! The Spaniards had believed the same thing, and conquered most of two continents before they paused to wonder. And the Lenelli had a lot more evidence going for them than the Spaniards ever had. “The goddess says Bottero beats Bucovin this time?” By now, Hasso recognized the future and the various past tenses when he heard them. Before long, he would have to start using them himself. People understood him when he stayed in the present, but he was starting to sound stupid in his own ears.

“She hasn’t said one way or the other,” Velona answered. “But why would she let us go forward if something bad would happen when we did?”

One more question Hasso couldn’t answer. Not having been devout back in Germany put him at a disadvantage here. You could argue about religion in the world he came from. Not in this one, not the same way. Spiritual things were as real here as Wednesday or a poke in the eye.

In his own world, he would have asked if the ambassador from Bucovin had been sent packing. Things worked the same here … to a point. The Lenello kingdoms exchanged envoys among themselves, and gave them safe-conduct home when they went to war. But no Lenello kingdom exchanged ambassadors with Bucovin. Recognizing the Grenye as equals would have been beneath the Lenelli’s dignity. They talked with Bucovin when they had to, but always unofficially, so they could pretend to themselves that it didn’t really count.

He found a different question instead: “Is the eastern border sealed?”

Velona looked blank. “What do you mean?”

Hasso wanted to bang his head against the stone outwall of Castle Drammen. Being security minister in a kingdom that didn’t know anything about security gave him unending frustration. Things he took for granted had never yet crossed the Lenelli’s minds. As patiently as he could, he explained: “Grenye go out of Drammen. They go out of Bottero’s kingdom. They go into Bucovin. They tell the Grenye what the king does. If we seal the border, they can’t cross and tell.”

“That wouldn’t be easy,” Velona said with a frown.

“No, not easy,” Hasso agreed. “But worth trying, yes? Stop some of them from going to Bucovin, Grenye there know less. The more we stop, the less Bucovin finds out.” I hope.

Velona couldn’t issue the orders. Neither could Hasso, not by himself. The Lenelli who knew him personally took him seriously. To the ones who didn’t, he would never be anything but a jumped-up outlander. So he took the idea to King Bottero. The King got it faster than Velona had. When he did, he kissed Hasso on both cheeks. He’d been eating onions, so Hasso appreciated the sentiment more than the kisses themselves.

“Who would have imagined such a thing?” Bottero boomed after releasing Hasso from his embrace. “The goddess knew what she was doing when she sent you to us, all right.”

To Hasso’s way of thinking, anyone who didn’t take those elementary precautions was asking to have his head handed to him. Were his own fourteenth-century ancestors this naive? If they were, it was a miracle any of them lived long enough to reproduce. Of course, the soldiers on both sides must have been equally inept, or somebody would have wiped the floor with somebody else.

“I’ll send the order out to the east by sorcery, so we don’t waste any more time,” Bottero said – yes, he did get it.

“Not just to the east. To the north and south and west, too,” Hasso said. “Seal the whole border.” Now the king looked blank. “Grenye can go up or down to another Lenello kingdom, one without a closed border. Then they go to Bucovin,” Hasso pointed out.

That got him kissed again. “You are as slippery as a slug, as sneaky as a serpent!” Bottero said. Hasso supposed those were compliments. The king went on, “I never would have thought of that – never, I tell you!”

Suppose Heinrich Himmler came from the Philippine Islands. That would probably make him more valuable to the Fuhrer, not less. He would still make a dandy security chief. But, as a manifest foreigner, he could never think of grabbing the topmost job for himself.

In Bottero’s kingdom, Hasso was far more foreign than a Filipino in Berlin. Another country? He was from another world! He would never be king, not even with the goddess at his side and at his back. Security minister and technical adviser was as high as he could rise. He had the post. Now he needed to deliver the goods.

“Can magic help to find Grenye who want to go east?” he asked. “Grenye who go through the swamp, say, not by the built-up road?”

“Grenye who sneak through the swamp.” Bottero tiptoed with his fingers on a tabletop to show what sneak meant. Hasso nodded his thanks; that was a useful verb for a security man to know. The king went on, “I’m no wizard myself, so I can’t really tell you. Aderno could.”