After the Downfall

But she laughed again, this time at him, though as far as he could tell without malice. “No, not a baby. I’m sure I’m not pregnant,” she said. “I just stopped flowing a couple of days before the battle, remember, and I’m glad I did, too. What I meant was, I’m eating for me and the goddess both.”

“Oh.” Feeling like a fool, Hasso thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. It hurt more than it should have; somewhere in the battle, he’d got a bruise there, even if he couldn’t remember how or when. And he found himself nodding. No wonder Velona never gained a gram! But carrying a goddess around wasn’t the sort of diet likely to become popular in Berlin or Cologne or Vienna… even if the German women in those towns were free of invaders, which they weren’t.

How big a toll did the goddess take on a mere mortal’s metabolism? Hasso had no idea, but Velona knew the answer from the inside out.

Her smile, he judged, held more than a little relief. “I could feel the goddess’ power running through me,” she said. “The savages could feel it, too, when I struck and even before that, when I bore down on them. I could tell.”

“I believe you,” Hasso said, which was nothing but the truth. When the goddess manifested herself in Velona, she definitely seemed more than human. Just being near her at such times made your hair prickle up, as if lightning had crashed down close by. Then, several beats more slowly than a Lenello would have, Hasso saw what she was driving at here. “We are in Bucovin, but the power still runs through you.”

“The goddess is still with me,” Velona agreed. But then her smile slipped. “It was like this the last time I came into Bucovin, too. At first, it was like this. After that… It wasn’t that the goddess left me, or not exactly like that. When she tried to speak, though, I couldn’t make out what she was saying. The land in these parts was thinking about something else.”

How did she mean that? Never having had any kind of divinity speak to him or through him, Hasso couldn’t know, not the way Velona did. He thought of a bad telephone connection. Then he laughed at himself. What good did a thought from his own world do him? He couldn’t make Velona or anyone else here understand it. What would telephones seem to the Lenelli but magic?

Crystal balls, now … They had crystal balls, or something like them. “Wizards can talk back and forth from far away, right?” he asked, an idea starting to sprout in his mind.

“Yes, that’s true.” Velona nodded. She laid her hand on his in what was, he realized a moment later, a gesture of sympathy. “I can guess how strange that must be to you, coming from a world with so little magic in it.”

Hasso didn’t laugh. If he started, he feared he wouldn’t be able to stop. Stick to business, he told himself. And so he did: “All right. If we split our army in two, the Grenye would also have to split their army in two, wouldn’t they?”

“I’d think so, but I’m no Grenye general, goddess be praised,” Velona said. “Where are you going with this?”

All at once, the sprouted idea flowered and fruited. “We can keep track of our two armies with magic, always know where they are, move together thanks to magic. We can come back together when we need to, and defeat the Grenye in detail.” For once, he found the technical term he needed right on the tip of his tongue. If that wasn’t a good omen, what would be?

Would Velona get it? Was it, in fact, a thought worth getting? Or was he misunderstanding the way things worked here? He waited to see how she responded.

He started to worry when she didn’t answer right away. Her brow creased in serious thought. Seeing those tiny wrinkles reminded him she was human as well as divine. Were these human, normal moments the ones Jesus’ followers had cherished most? Hasso wouldn’t have been surprised, though none of the Gospels talked about anything so completely mundane.

“It could work,” Velona said at last. “It could well work. We didn’t need such tricks when we fought the Grenye after we first came across the sea. We knew so much more than they did, the fights were walkovers. A ploy like that wouldn’t work when Lenelli fight Lenelli, because there’s magic on both sides then. But against Bucovin … Yes, it might be just the thing.” A slow smile spread across her face. “And how fitting to turn their mindblindness against them, to use it as one of our weapons of war.”

She kissed him. It didn’t go any further than that, not then. They were both weary from the fighting. Hasso stank even in his own nostrils: of horse, of sweat, of fear, and of the blood that splashed his mailshirt and his skin. He didn’t think Velona smelled of fear. That was a pretty good sign she had the goddess dwelling in her. After a battle, few people could avoid the sour stink of terror.

“You will tell the king tomorrow,” she said, as if she were an officer giving a common soldier his orders.