After the Downfall

Hasso was made … like a man. He said, “But you think all Lenelli are big pricks.” The joke worked in Lenello the same as it did in German. Odds were it worked in most languages.

Rautat laughed and laughed. “You’re a funny fellow, all right. Pretty soon, you’ll find out whether it does you any good.”

“Ja.” Hasso didn’t like the sound of that.

In Drammen, the Lenello nobles had their fine houses in the center of town, near the royal palace. Broad lawns separated those mansions from the streets and from the lesser dwellings of hoi polloi. Again, the Bucovinans imitated the newcomers … to a point. Their prominent people did have large houses. Sometimes the buildings even had stone ground floors. But the second story was invariably timber or wattle and daub, and almost all the roofs were thatched. Only a handful had tiles like the palace.

Almost all of them, though, had a garden rather than a lawn – or if they did have grass, a cow or a couple of sheep grazed on it under a herdsman’s watchful eyes. The idea of bare ground for the sake of decoration or swank didn’t seem to have got here from the west.

A plump man in a tunic with extra-fancy embroidery took a chicken from someone who looked poorer than he was. He wrung the chicken’s neck and cast the carcass onto a brazier heaped high with glowing charcoal. ‘“What’s he doing?” Hasso asked.

“He’s a priest making a thanks-offering or a sin-offering for that fellow.” Rautat gave him a curious look. “Don’t your priests do that?”

Hasso thought of the last Wehrmacht chaplain he’d talked to, a dour Lutheran who didn’t even smoke (and, once again, the longing for a cigarette sneaked up and bit him in the ass). He tried to imagine Klaus Frisch sacrificing a chicken to propitiate an angry Jehovah. “Well,” he said, “no.”

“How do you know your gods pay any attention to you, then?” Rautat persisted.

“Good question,” Hasso said, and then, counterattacking, “How do you know your gods do? Why don’t you follow the goddess?”

Even riding through the streets of his own capital with the Wehrmacht officer a helpless prisoner, Rautat looked scared shitless. “The goddess hears Lenelli first,” he said. “She wouldn’t listen to the likes of me.”

From what Hasso had seen, that might well be true. And yet … “Plenty of Grenye in King Bottero’s realm worship her.”

The most scornful majordomo in two worlds couldn’t have let out a sniffier sniff than Rautat’s. “There are Grenye who want to be Lenelli,” he said.”I don’t, thank you very much.”

He spoke fluent Lenello. He wore Lenello-style armor. His city had Lenello-style fortifications grafted onto its older works. His sovereign’s palace even had Lenello-style roof tiles. And he said he didn’t want to be a Lenello?

Well, maybe he didn’t. The Japanese wore Western-style clothes. They had Western-style industries, and a Western-style military, too. But did they want to turn into Americans or Englishmen or Germans? Hasso didn’t think so. They used Western techniques to let them stay what they already were: Japanese. Maybe the Bucovinans could pull off the same stunt here.

But, if they couldn’t work magic and the Lenelli damn well could, the odds were against them.

Still affronted, Rautat went on, “Besides, who knows what mongrel clans those Grenye come from? We’re better people than that, we are.”

Once more, Hasso carefully didn’t smile. Had the plains Indians looked down their noses like that at the coastal Indians who quickly succumbed to the English colonizers? They probably had … till it was their turn.

When Hasso got a close look at Lord Zgomot’s palace, he decided he wouldn’t want to try to take it without heavy artillery. Yes, maybe Bottero was lucky he didn’t make it to Falticeni. He might have thrown away a lot more men here than he did in the lost battle.

Or the goddess might have manifested herself through Velona and knocked the capital of Bucovin flat. If you had magic, if the gods really did take part in what happened on earth, maybe you didn’t need 105s and 155s. After all, Joshua knocked down Jericho’s walls without them.

Every time Hasso thought about anybody from the Old Testament, he started to look around nervously. No, dummy, he thought. Nobody from the Gestapo’s going to haul you away, not here. You can let a Jew cross your mind every now and then.

Rautat shouted to the sentries in their own language. They yelled back. Hasso couldn’t understand a word of it. His mind went back to wandering. If the goddess could come through here, why didn’t she do it a long time ago? The land fights for them. Velona wasn’t the only one who’d said it. What did it mean? It wasn’t magic – the Lenelli insisted on that. But it was something.