Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

Bottero gestured. Hasso got to his feet. Even standing, the top of his head came up to about the bottom of the king's nose. In Germany, he'd got used to looking at the tops of other people's heads. Most of the Lenelli could do it to him. He didn't like that, especially since his sandy hair was beginning to thin up there.

When the king said something, Hasso had to shrug. "I'm sorry, your Majesty. Don't speak much Lenello yet," he said. Velona had taught him your Majesty just before he went into the throne room. What was he supposed to call her? Your Divinity? She was divine, all right, but not in the theological sense of the word.

Bottero looked annoyed — not at Hasso, but at himself. He said something else. Then he called Aderno's name. The wizard came up and went to his knees. Bottero spoke to him, impatiently. Get up! Get up! It had to mean something like that. As Aderno rose, he said, "His Majesty says you look like one of us, so he forgot you weren't."

If I'm a Lenello, I look like a damn runt, Hasso thought. They couldn't shoot you for thinking, not if you kept your big mouth shut. Not even the Gestapo or the NKVD did that. "Tell his Majesty I'm glad to be here." I'm glad to be anywhere. I wasn't a good bet to still be breathing now.

As usual, Hasso heard the Lenello words without understanding them when the wizard spoke to the king. He couldn't follow Bottero's reply, either. But when Aderno spoke to him, he heard Lenello in his ears and what might as well have been German in his mind. "His Majesty says he is glad to have you — all the Lenelli are glad to have you — since you saved the goddess on earth from the Grenye savages."

"I was glad to do it," Hasso said. He'd been glad to do it even before Velona offered him what maidens — not that she was — used to call their all. After that…

After that, he would have followed her to Siam, or maybe to the moon.

What would he have done if she were small and dark and plain — Jewish-looking went through his mind — and the men chasing her were perfect Aryans? Would he have opened up on them anyway? Or would he have waited to find out what the hell was going on? He had no idea.

King Bottero spoke again. "Not half so glad as we were to have it done," Aderno translated.

"Where do we go from here?" Hasso asked. He'd seen the Fuhrer a couple of times, but never spoken to him. He would have been awed if he had. Talking to a king didn't awe him a bit. Talking to this king didn't, anyhow. If a Kaiser still ruled Germany, or even if he'd met George VI of England, that might have been different. But Bottero seemed no more than an ungodly tall man in odd fancy dress who wore a gold circlet with ball-topped knobs sticking up from it.

He did have an impressive bass rumble. Aderno's lighter voice turned his words into ones that made sense to Hasso: "You did us a service. I hope you will take service with us. I have heard you know fighting tricks we would all do well to learn, and I have also heard the power dwells in you."

Hasso started to say he didn't know anything about the power. At the last second, he clamped down on that. The less he gave away, the better off he was likely to stay. And so all that came out was, "I'll be happy to join you, your Majesty."

After the wizard turned that into Lenello, King Bottero's ice-blue eyes suddenly twinkled. A grin pulled up the outer corners of his mouth. He set a massive hand on Hasso's shoulder and said something in what could only be a man- to- man tone. Hasso figured out the likely translation even before Aderno gave it: "I'll bet you will. She's quite a woman, isn't she?"

"Yes, your Majesty." Hasso could say that in Lenello. He would have meant it no matter what language he used. Then he eyed the king's roguish expression in a different way. Was he imagining things, or did Bottero sound as if he knew exactly what he was talking about?

The Wehrmacht officer didn't see any polite way to ask the king. Maybe he would be able to find a polite way to ask Velona. Or maybe he didn't want to know.

Then Bottero spoke again, and Hasso found out whether he wanted to or not. "His Majesty makes himself remember you are a foreigner, and so you are not used to our ways," Aderno said. He waited for Hasso to nod, then went on, "He will borrow the goddess for the coming summer solstice, as he does each solstice and equinox. No doubt, he says, you have some such customs in your own land."

"No doubt," Hasso said tonelessly. He'd heard of pagan fertility rites, but he'd never dreamt they might matter to him. And what the hell was he supposed to say when the king told him, Hey, I'm going to borrow your girlfriend for a night? If he said, No, you're not, chances were he'd be shorter by a head. And if he said no to Velona, she was liable to laugh at him. If she was the goddess on earth, wasn't this part of her job requirement?

"You don't say much," King Bottero observed through Aderno. He might be the size of a draft horse, but he was no dummy.

"What am I supposed to say?" Hasso made himself shrug. "If it doesn't bother Velona, how can I squawk?"

Bottero laughed when he heard that. "I knew you were a sensible fellow," he said, and gave Hasso a slap on the back that almost knocked him sprawling. "When you get right down to it, the women do the deciding."

"Ja," Hasso agreed with a crooked smile. Pagan fertility rites or not, this world and the one he'd escaped weren't so very different. He turned to Aderno. "If I take service here, I know whose service I'm joining. Who's on the other side?"

"A wise question. You should always know your foes at least as well as your friends," the wizard said. The Wehrmacht officer grunted. Hitler should have thought about that before he got into a war against both the USA and the USSR. If the Fuhrer had, Hasso wouldn't have been standing here right now. Aderno went on, "You would serve his Majesty against the other Lenello kingdoms, except the ones that are allies."

Hasso nodded. "That makes sense."

But Aderno wasn't done. "And you would serve him in ensuring that the Grenye in his kingdom know their place — know it and keep it."

"Fair enough." If you were going to rule people you'd conquered, they had to respect you. Hasso had seen that in Russia. Let them think they were as good as you were and there'd be hell to pay. The Germans had paid it, too.

"And" — now Aderno seemed like someone holding his nose against a bad smell that wouldn't go away — "there is Bucovin." When King Bottero heard the name, he made a horrible face, too.

"Bucovin?" Hasso echoed, as he was no doubt meant to do.

"The heart of the Grenye infection," Aderno said grimly. He pointed. "It lies to the east."

Bottero spoke. "His Majesty says the Grenye lie all the time, and from any direction."

"Heh," Hasso said. How close to the border was Castle Svarag? Had Velona been escaping from Bucovin? If she had, why didn't the people on her heels carry anything better than peasant weapons? All kinds of interesting questions. But a bigger one occurred to Hasso: "You have magic and the Grenye don't?"

"Certainly." Aderno drew himself up like an affronted cat. "We are Lenelli, after all, and they are only Grenye." When the wizard translated the question for the king, Bottero's big head bobbed up and down.

"Right," Hasso said. He hoped the sarcasm wouldn't make it through the translation spell. To try to blunt it if it did, he went on, "What I don't understand is, if you can work magic and they can't, why didn't you beat them a long time ago?" He thought of the conquistadors with their guns and horses and dogs and iron armor, and of the Indians who'd gone down in windrows before them.

Again, Aderno turned the question into Lenello for his king. "We're getting there," Bottero said. "Our ships only found this land two centuries ago. We've pushed the savages back a long way from the sea. But Bucovin… Bucovin is difficult." He nodded again, seeming pleased he'd found the right word.