Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

With a sour chuckle, Bottero said, "She knows we need the ritual. What can she do?"

"I understand, your Majesty," Hasso said. "I feel the same."

"Bucovin." King Bottero made a fist and slammed it down on the map spread out on the table in front of him. "By the goddess, we really are going to do something about Bucovin this time around. We've put up with the miserable place too long already."

Blond heads bobbed up and down, Hasso's among them. He'd got invited to the meeting not because of his own rank but because Velona wanted him there with her. Otherwise, he would have been as welcome as… as a no-account Wehrmacht captain in the Fuhrer's bunker, he thought. Yes, the comparison was apt enough.

Looking at a map like that, even a no-account Wehrmacht captain would have wanted to hang himself. How could you make war without decent maps? This one didn't have any kind of scale. It didn't have any kind of projection. As far as he could tell, the Lenelli had never heard of such things. This was just a rough sketch of the lands that centered on Drammen.

There was the marsh where Hasso had come into this world, pictured with a stippling of dots. There was the road on the causeway — at least, he presumed that was what the thin, straight red line meant. And there was Bucovin, to the east. The capital was a place called Falticeni; Hasso sounded it out a syllable at a time. Lenello used one character for a sound that needed four in German. Had Hasso been writing it, he would have spelled it Faltitscheni.

One of Bottero's marshals stabbed a forefinger at the place. He was a middle-aged fellow named Lugo. By local standards, he was short — about Hasso's height. But he was almost twice as wide through the shoulders. If you hit him and he decided to notice, he'd rip your spleen out.

"We'll burn it and sow salt so nothing grows there again," he rumbled, his voice half an octave lower than even the king's basso.

A Grenye servant came in, set a tray full of mugs of beer and wine and a plate of sausages baked in dough — a local delicacy — on the table, and then strolled out again. Hasso pointed to him as he went and asked, "Why he listen?"

"Who? Sfintu? What's wrong with Sfintu?" Bottero asked, genuine puzzlement in his voice.

Hasso wanted to bang his head against the wall. They'd never heard of security. They didn't even suspect they'd never heard of it. How to spell things out in words of one syllable, especially when words of one syllable were almost the only kind he knew?

"Sfintu is a Grenye." He stated the obvious. "Bucovin is Grenye. If Sfintu listens, if Sfintu talks to someone from Bucovin, they know what you do before you do it."

"A spy!" Velona got it. "He's saying Sfintu is a spy."

"Well, Sfintu bloody well isn't," Bottero declared. "He was born here. He's as loyal as the day is long. He likes Lenelli better than his own grubby kind."

Maybe that was true. Hasso wouldn't have bet anything he cared about losing on it — his neck, for instance. It wasn't what he wanted to argue about, though. Patiently, he said, "Even if Sfintu is loyal, he can talk to someone not loyal. Not even know someone he talk to is not loyal. But Bucovin learn things anyway."

Bottero and Velona and Lugo and the other big shots in the Kingdom of Drammen thought about that. Hasso could almost hear wheels turning and gears meshing. The Lenelli weren't stupid, even if they were naive. "You don't trust anyone, do you?" Bottero said.

"No," Hasso answered. "War too big — too, uh, important — for trust."

"Your kingdom must win a lot of wars," Lugo remarked.

That hurt too much to laugh, and Hasso didn't want to cry in front of the Lenelli. Germany had twice astonished the world with what her armies could do — and she would have been better off never to have fought at all. What would happen to her after this war was finally lost hardly bore thinking about.

Instead of thinking about it, Hasso said, "Keep secrets, better chance. Tell enemy, not better chance." He was pretty much stuck in the present indicative. Sooner or later, he would figure out other verb forms. He was starting to understand them when he heard them. Using them himself was a different story.

King Bottero plucked a hair from his beard. "You know some things we don't, plainly. How would you like to be in charge of keeping things quiet?"

How would you like to be security minister? Bottero didn't even have the words to say what he meant. How would you like to be Heinrich Himmler? Bottero didn't have the name, either, which probably wasn't the worst thing in the world.

"Can I do job?" Hasso asked. "Not know magic."

Several of the marshals sneered at that. "You'd be worrying about the Grenye," Lugo said. "They don't know any more about magic than pigs know about poetry."

The Reich had learned some bitter lessons about underestimating its enemies. Operation Barbarossa should have knocked the Soviet Union out of the war by the first winter. And it would have, too, if only the Russians had cooperated. They hadn't.

"Two things," he said in his slow, bad Lenello. "One thing is, if Grenye have no magic, why Lenelli not conquer Bucovin before this? Two thing is, Lenelli have Bucovin for enemy. King Bottero have — uh, has — also other Lenelli for enemy. I keep things quiet, I keep things quiet from Grenye and from other Lenelli. And Lenelli have magic for sure. Bucovin?" He turned to Velona. "What has Bucovin?"

She'd gone in there. She must have hoped magic would protect her. It hadn't done the job, or she wouldn't have been running for her life when Hasso splashed into the swamp. If whatever gave her away to the Grenye in Bucovin wasn't magic, what the devil was it?

"I don't know what they have there," she answered, her voice troubled. "Whatever it is, it doesn't show. The countryside looks like our countryside, with the Grenye on little farms. They keep ducks and partridges. They don't have many big animals — we brought those here when we landed. The ones they do have, they mostly stole."

"Talk about magic," Lugo said impatiently. "Uh, goddess." Even if he was impatient, he remembered to be polite. Had he watched Bottero screw her? Or had he been screwing a mere mortal himself right then?

"You can't talk about magic in Bucovin without talking about Bucovin," Velona said, and then, to Hasso, "You have to understand what a funny place it is. They have castles like ours along the roads — a lot like ours. They model theirs after the ones we build." Her mouth twisted. "Sometimes they have renegades helping them, too."

Hasso thought again of the drunken Lenello in the Grenye section of Drammen, the one his escorts hadn't wanted to see. He wondered if he ought to haul the fellow in and grill him. Then he wondered something else. "They have renegade wizards help them?"

Several men swore, including the king. So did Velona. Women here didn't have to speak modestly. He got the idea she would have sworn even if women were supposed to stay modest. It wasn't just that she was the goddess and could get away with it, either. It was her style.

"There have been renegade wizards," Bottero said heavily. "We make examples of them when we catch them. We don't want that kind of nonsense" — he used a barnyard word instead — "spreading. But they aren't the problem, not in Bucovin."

"No, they aren't," Velona agreed. "It's something else. I got into Suceava — "

"Where?" Hasso asked.

She showed him on the map. It was the nearest town east of the marsh. I might have known, he thought. "Their towns, now, their towns are truly strange. They're more like overgrown villages than proper cities. But they aren't like that, either. They're… different."

One of Bottero's officers nodded. Hasso thought his name was Nolio. "I've been into Bucovin pretending to be a trader," he said. They do know something about spying, then, Hasso thought. Nolio went on, "You just feel wrong going there. Out of place. Like even the walls and the floor are staring at you, let alone the people. And the people are worse. They don't respect you the way Grenye are supposed to. They think they're as good as you are, the dogs."