After the Downfall

They turned a last corner. There was the throne room. There, on what looked like a dining-room chair wrapped in gold leaf, sat Lord Zgomot. The court official poked Hasso in the ribs with an elbow. “Bow!” he said.

Again, Hasso was in no position to argue. Bow he did. As he straightened, he sized up the ruler of Bucovin. King Bottero had put him in mind of Hermann Goring, Goring the way he had been before defeat and drugs diminished him: big, bold, swaggering, flamboyant, enjoying to the hilt the power that had landed in his lap.

Zgomot, by contrast, wore a mink coat that would have made Marlene Dietrich jealous, but still looked like nothing so much as the druggist in a small Romanian town. He was small himself, and skinny, with a pinched face, a beak of a nose, and a black beard streaked with gray.

His eyebrows were thick and black, too, and almost met in the middle. The dark eyes under them, though, seemed disconcertingly shrewd. He was taking Hasso’s measure as Hasso studied him.

“So … You are the strange one, the one from nowhere, of whom we have heard.” Unlike Rautat’s or the functionary’s, Zgomot’s Lenello was almost perfect. The only hint that he wasn’t a native speaker was the extremely precise way in which he expressed himself. He wasn’t at ease in the language, as Bottero or Velona or Orosei would have been.

Poor Orosei, Hasso thought. He was glad the king and the goddess – the king and his lover – had got away. He wished like hell he’d got away himself.

But he damn well hadn’t. And now he had to deal with this native – who was no doubt trying to figure out how to deal with him. “Yes, Lord,” he said: he was who Zgomot claimed he was.

The Lord of Bucovin pursed his lips. He didn’t look like a happy man, the way Bottero usually did. He had the air of someone whose stomach pained him. “Are you as dangerous as people say you are?” he asked.

“I don’t know, your Majesty. How dangerous do people say I am?” Hasso answered.

“Don’t you be insolent!” the palace official snapped.

“He is not being insolent,” Zgomot said. “Most people never know what others say about them behind their back.”

So there, Hasso thought. He got the idea lying to Zgomot wouldn’t be smart, not if you had any chance of getting caught later on. “Lord, I don’t know how dangerous I am. After I come here, I try to serve King Bottero as best I can, that’s all,” he said.

“You had the thunder weapon, yes?” Zgomot said. “You almost killed me with it in the first fight, yes?”

“Yes,” Hasso admitted.

“And you’re the one who came up with the column to strike with, yes?” the Lord of Bucovin persisted.

“Yes,” Hasso said again, wondering if he was cooking his own goose.

“Then you’re dangerous.” Zgomot spoke in tones that brooked no contradiction. He eyed Hasso. “If you’d come here – to this place – in Bucovin instead of where you did, would you have served me as best you could instead of that big pig of a Bottero?”

You wouldn’t have had Velona to persuade me. Persuade! Ha! That’s a word! But if I’d come down by Falticeni, I wouldn’t have known anything about Velona. And what a shame that would have been! The thoughts flickered through Hasso’s mind in a fraction of a second. “I don’t know, Lord. Probably,” he replied aloud. “Unless your people kill me for being a Lenello, I mean.”

“Chance you take when you’re big and blond,” Zgomot observed, his smile thin to the point of starvation. How big an inferiority complex did the Grenye carry? How could you blame them if it was about the size of the dragon whose fang they so proudly displayed? The Lord of Bucovin went on, “Since you are here now, will you serve me the way you served Bottero even though he didn’t deserve you?”

This time, Hasso didn’t answer right away. The easiest thing to do was say yes and then do his best to get away or minimize his contributions. But he remembered again what he thought of Field Marshal Paulus. And he knew what Wehrmacht troops thought of the Russians who fought for the Reich. You might use them – you might use them up – but you’d never, ever trust them.

Slowly, he said, “Lord, I am King Bottero’s sworn man. How can I serve his enemy?” He wondered if he’d just written his own obituary.

“A good many Lenelli have no trouble at all.” Zgomot’s voice was dryer than a sandstorm in the Sahara. “We do keep an eye on them, but they’re mostly so happy to stay alive that they show us whatever they can. We’ve learned a lot from them.”

“Would you let one of them do anything really important?” Hasso asked.

Now the Lord of Bucovin hesitated. “Mm – maybe not,” he said at last.

“Then maybe you understand, sir. King Bottero lets me do those things. You don’t – you won’t – you wouldn’t.”

“Suppose your other choice is the chopper?”