Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

"So many dead horses," Rautat said sadly. "What a waste." At least a hundred of them lay twisted right in front of the Hedgehogs' position. They'd done what their riders told them to do, and they'd paid for it. So had a lot of the men who spurred them forward. The Lenelli didn't know what they were up against till too late.

There lay King Bottero. Bucovinans had already stolen his fine sword, his helm with the gold circlet, his gilded mailshirt. Despite the byrnie, he'd taken a lot of wounds. He didn't have a son. The succession in Drammen was liable to get messy. That was good news for Bucovin, too.

And there lay Velona, her golden hair all sodden with blood. None of the Bucovinans had taken the sword from her hand. They knew who she was, and they knew what she was, and they didn't want anything to do with her.

They weren't so dumb.

Even Rautat hung back a couple of steps as Hasso knelt beside her. "So that's what she looks like up close," the underofficer said. "If you like great big blondes, I guess she's pretty."

Hasso hardly heard him. He eased the sword from his one-time beloved's grip, then reached out to touch her hand. When he did, he frowned. She should have been cooler than that if she were dead. His index and middle fingers found that spot on her wrist by the thumb side of the tendons. Her pulse was slow, but it was there. "Jesus!" he muttered: another deity missing in action here.

"What?" Rautat said.

"She's not dead," Hasso said. "She's just knocked out."

Rautat started to draw his belt knife to remedy that. Then he jammed it back into the sheath. "I don't dare," he said, "not against the goddess." He took off on the dead run.

Hasso would have stopped him if he had tried to kill Velona. He wondered why, when she'd come so close to killing him. He also wondered what the hell he was going to do with her — to her? — when she came to. He didn't fear the goddess the way Rautat did, which probably meant he didn't understand the situation as well as the native did.

Cautiously feeling, he found a knot on the side of her head. He nodded to himself. Going into battle without a helmet was great for heartening your friends and frightening your foes. When it came to actually fighting… not so good. He probed a little harder. If she had a fractured skull, she might not wake up — which might prove a relief for everybody but her.

She grimaced and tried to twist away from him. She wasn't deeply out, then. That was a good sign, or maybe a bad one, depending on how you looked at things. Then her eyes opened. For a moment, she had no idea who he was, who she was herself, or what the hell was going on. Hasso sympathized. He'd been down that road himself the autumn before. A concussion was not your friend.

She blinked, and blinked again. Her mouth set. Reason was coming back. Those blue, blue eyes found his. "You!" she said, her voice a hoarse croak.

"Afraid so." Lenello came rustily from his lips. He wasn't used to hearing it without a rough Bucovinan accent any more, either. "Want some water?"

"Please."

He had a jug on his belt. He took it off and held it to her lips. She drank and drank. "Better?" he asked when she'd almost emptied it.

"A little, maybe." She needed two tries to sit up. When she looked around and saw Bucovinans roaming the field and Lenelli and their chargers down and dead in windrows, she looked first humanly astonished and then more than humanly outraged. "What did you do to us? What did we do to you to deserve… this?"

"Well, trying to kill me makes a pretty good start." Hasso worked hard to remember the past tenses that had given him so much trouble; he needed them here. "I loved you, and you tried to cook my brains for me."

He watched her gaze sharpen. If she could have slain him right there, she would have done it. But she couldn't even start; it was like watching an archer try to shoot in a driving rainstorm. "My wits are all scrambled," she muttered.

"I believe it," Hasso said. "You are going to have headaches like you don't believe. Takes days, maybe weeks, to get over." He tapped the side of his own head. "I know."

"What did you do?" Velona repeated. "The flying thunder… That forest of spears…" She shuddered, then winced, plainly wishing she hadn't. "And none of our magic worked. We've had to deal with renegades, but this…! How the goddess must hate you!"

"I take my chances," Hasso said, which shocked her. Well, too bad. It was too bad, in too many ways, but he couldn't do anything about any of them now. He continued, "I tell you something else, too. You need to remember it. All Lenelli need to remember it."

"Go on," she said. "I'm listening. Right now, I don't have much choice."

"Simple. Easy. Four words — Grenye are people, too." In Bucovinan, it would have been one word. "People," Hasso said again. "Strong enough to stand against Lenelli. Isn't that a big part of what makes people?"

Velona's chin came up. "Little black-haired mindblind savages." Cutting through a couple of hundred years' worth of Lenello arrogance wouldn't be easy or quick.

Hasso was about to remind her that King Zgomot's so-called savages had whipped the living snot out of her kingdom twice running. Before he could, someone behind him said, "I didn't know she would be so beautiful."

He whirled. There stood Drepteaza and, several paces behind her and looking scared, Rautat. Hasso felt almost as if she'd caught him being unfaithful with Velona. He glanced at the goddess on earth. She looked like hell: haggard, battered, bruised, and filthy, her hair all matted with blood. All the same, the essence remained, and Drepteaza saw down to it.

Velona was looking from one of them to the other, too. And she also knew what she saw. "Who is this… person?" she asked Hasso, and if the last word of the question held a certain mocking edge, what could he do about it? It was the word he'd used himself.

"I am Drepteaza, priestess of Lavtrig in Falticeni." She spoke for herself, in her own excellent Lenello. "And…" She stepped forward and took Hasso's hand in hers.

"Yes. And." He squeezed hers.

Velona's eyes flashed. "Disgusting," she said.

"As a matter of fact, no," Hasso told her. This time, Drepteaza squeezed him. But he had to speak to Velona again: "You warn me not to love you. How do you blame me if I love someone else?"

Velona stared at him. So did Drepteaza. Had he said anything to her about love? He didn't think so. His timing was less than ideal. He'd have to fix that later. Now… Now Velona spoke to him as if he were an idiot — and she doubtless thought he was. As if spelling out what he should have known already, she said, "I meant a Lenello, not a Grenye."

"Too bad," Hasso said. "Grenye are people, too." He underscored that by switching to Bucovinan to ask Drepteaza, "What do we do with her?"

"I don't know," the priestess answered in the same language. No, Velona didn't speak it — Hasso hadn't thought she would stoop to learning. Drepteaza went on, "We could do two things, I suppose. We could kill her or let her go."

"Not keep her prisoner, the way you do — uh, did — with me?" Hasso asked.

"If she were only Velona, I would say yes, we could do that," Drepteaza said. "With the goddess in her…" She shook her head. "I don't know how much power she can pull through that connection. I don't want to find out. It could be worse than keeping all your gunpowder prisoner in one place."

Hasso grunted and nodded. He'd always thought Velona was so much female dynamite. Here was his own thought come back to him transmuted. "How much bad luck goes with killing her?" he wondered aloud.

"I don't know the answer to that, either," Drepteaza said. "Even with an amulet that works, I'm not sure I want to find out. Do you?"

"She would kill me in a heartbeat." Hasso's eyes kept sliding to Velona. Beat-up as she was, she still looked damn good to him. Drepteaza had to know it, too. He would likely end up paying for that later. He sighed. "I haven't got the heart to do it, regardless of bad luck."