After the Downfall

The rest of the wizards laughed till they had to hold their sides. “You want to be thrown and stomped and gored, don’t you?” said one of them, a beanpole of a man named Flegrei.

“No. I want to ride a unicorn.” Hasso reached into a pocket – he was wearing his Wehrmacht trousers, which boasted such refinements – and pulled out a goldpiece. “This says I can do it.”

“You’re on!” Flegrei shouted, and showed off his own shiny coin.

All the wizards except Aderno clamored to bet Hasso. He had to check whether he had enough money with him to cover them. As it turned out, he did. He thought they really wanted not just his gold but to watch him get thrown and stomped and gored. Since he figured Aderno had more reason to want that than any of the others, he asked, “You, too?”

Aderno bit his lip. Yes, he wanted to watch the foreigner fail, too. He just wasn’t so sure as the rest of the wizards that Hasso would. In the end, though, he nodded. “Yes, me, too. Why not?”

Hasso turned out not to have one more coin. “If the unicorn kills me, tell Velona I say she should pay you,” he said. Aderno nodded. Hasso bowed to the other wizards. “Whose unicorn do I ride?”

“You mean, whose unicorn don’t you ride?” Flegrei jeered. “You can try with mine. Once you get what you deserve, maybe you won’t strut so tall.”

That gibe stung. Hasso didn’t like being short among the Lenelli. He briefly wondered how the Grenye, most of whom were much shorter than he was, enjoyed looking up to the big blond men from out of the west. But then the Grenye slipped from his mind. He bowed again. “Shorten the stirrup leathers, please,” he told Flegrei, whose legs were much longer than his.

Flegrei’s answering bow was scorn personified. “At your service, my prickly little hedgehog,” he said. Hasso watched him closely as he adjusted them, but he did an honest job of it. That had to mean he really didn’t believe Hasso could stay on the unicorn. When Flegrei finished, he stepped away from the beautiful snowy beast. “All yours.”

“Danke sch o n” Hasso forgot Lenello for the moment. He walked up to the unicorn. It looked at him sidelong out of an eye as blue as Velona’s. A low snort, more curious than anything else – he hoped – came from it. The wizards murmured among themselves. Maybe they’d expected the unicorn to run him through with its horn as soon as he got anywhere near it.

Before he could think about what he was doing, he swung up into the saddle. The unicorn snorted again, this time sounding distinctly surprised. It started to buck.

“Cut that out,” he said, and went to work calming it as he would have with a restive horse. And the unicorn, sensing that the new rider, though a stranger, had some notion of what he was doing up there, did calm down. He rode it in a slow circle around the staring wizards and halted directly in front of Flegrei.

Dismounting, he bowed yet again and held out his hand. “Nice animal. Now pay up, you cocksure bastard.”

Goggling, Flegrei paid. “How did you do that?” he choked out.

“Easy.” Hasso jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “I’m magic. You’re smart, you stop screwing with me.” He went around to the other wizards, collecting a goldpiece from each of them. He saved Aderno for last. “You, too.”

“Here.” Aderno gave him the coin. “You are magical, or you can be. If you saw the gold star, you certainly can be. But I didn’t think potential would satisfy a unicorn – which shows I don’t know as much as I wish I did. There is more to you than meets the eye, Hasso Pemsel. How much more keeps surprising me, and not always happily.”

Back in Germany, Hasso thought, I’d have to be a virgin to ride a unicorn. But there were no unicorns in Germany. And, with the Russians rampaging through the country all hot with vengeance, there probably weren’t a hell of a lot of virgins left there, either.

The wizards squabbled furiously. “He saw gold?” Flegrei shouted at Aderno. “Why the demon didn’t you say so? You would have saved us all some money!”

“You would have saved us from looking like idiots, too,” another sorcerer said.

“Nothing could save some people from looking like idiots.” Aderno could be bitchy.

“You must be one of them,” the other wizard retorted. “If he saw gold and you bet against him, you deserved to lose, by the goddess.”

“It’s not just the talent – it’s the training. Or I thought it was,” Aderno said. “But it seems I was wrong.”

“Yes, it seems you were.” Flegrei sounded disgusted. “And it cost all of us gold, and now the goddess-cursed foreigner will be more puffed up than ever.”

Hasso felt like making his chest swell up and strutting around like a pouter pigeon. He decided not to, though; Flegrei was already angry enough at him. And Aderno said, “Watch your mouth, you blockhead! Whatever the foreigner is, he’s not goddess-cursed. Velona will put your ears on a necklace if she hears you go around saying he is.”

“Ha! I’m not afraid of her,” Flegrei declared.