Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

"They are free," Hasso said.

"Wild," Bottero corrected. All the Lenelli around the table, Velona included, nodded solemnly. That was how it looked to them. How it looked to the Grenye… they didn't care. And if you've got any brains, you won't care, either — or you won't let on that you care.

"What goes wrong when you visit Bucovin?" Hasso asked Velona. He'd tried to ask before, but he was getting better at the language now.

Not good enough, though. "What went wrong when I visited, you mean?" she asked. That was what he meant. He was starting to recognize past tenses when he read them and even when he heard them, but they wouldn't come out of his mouth with any reliability. But Velona sounded as sheepish as she ever did when she said, "What went wrong? Everything, near enough." She threw her hands wide, and almost knocked a mug of beer out of Nolio's hand.

"Why? How? You have magic. You are the goddess."

"It's like Nolio says. In Bucovin, everything watches you. The towns, the people, I don't know what, but something there seems to suck the life out of magic. It works, and then you get deeper in and it doesn't work so well, and then it just… stops. Almost makes you think Grenye have their own magic. But they don't — they can't," Velona said.

"That's so," King Bottero said. "When we fight there, it's us against them. Spells mostly fail — and the more we depend on them, the worse the time they pick to fail. One of us, mounted, in armor, is worth, four, five, six, eight of those stinking churls on foot. But they're starting to use more horsemen, and Bucovin's a big place, too." He pointed to the map again. "They have big armies, and they don't fight fair. They mostly won't give us standup battles. They skulk and they raid and they burn our wagons and — " He broke off, an angry flush rising all the way up to his scalp. "What's so cursed funny?"

"Sorry, your Majesty." Despite the apology, Hasso had to work to make himself quit laughing. It was either laugh or cry, which would have surprised the king even more. Bottero's complaints sounded much too familiar. How many German generals had said those exact same things about the Russians? One Landser was always worth a couple of Ivans, sometimes more than that. Throw enough Ivans into the fight, though… Stalin put out a fire by smothering it in corpses. If you had enough corpses, it worked, too. Picking his words with care, Hasso said, "My people fight a war like that, too."

"Ah?" the king said. "With all your tricks and ploys, I bet you had better luck than we ever managed to find."

"Well," Hasso said, "no." He bit down hard on the inside of his lower lip. Tears bubbled very close to the surface. He turned back to Velona. "The goddess not help the, uh, the plain you?" He hoped she would follow what he meant.

And she did, for she answered, "Even her power seems less there. Not gone, but less. To use it to go on — I couldn't. They sniffed me out as being something that didn't belong there. Maybe as a danger. I'm not so sure of that. When they were going to seize me, though, when I had to flee, then she gave me what I needed." Her smile almost dazzled him. "Then she led me to you."

One of Bottero's officers swore softly. Hasso knew why. Any man who wasn't dead or a fairy would want that woman smiling at him that way and saying those things to him. And Hasso was convinced that even a fairy, seeing Velona, would reconsider. Seeing her smile that way, hearing her talk that way, to someone else had to burn like acid.

"So," the king said, "will you help us keep secrets? You want help with the wizardry, I'll give you Aderno."

The proud wizard would no doubt pitch a fit at working for a foreigner who'd literally fallen out of the sky. Hasso liked that idea. It wasn't what swayed him, though. The job needed doing, and he could likely do it better than any Lenello. "Yes, your Majesty," he said.

Aderno was as thrilled about working under Hasso as the Wehrmacht officer figured he would be. Thanks to his translation spell, the wizard didn't have to pull any punches, either. "If you weren't sleeping with the goddess, King Bottero never would have given you this post."

"I know," Hasso said calmly. That made the wizard's jaw drop. Still calmly, Hasso went on, "If I hadn't rescued the goddess, I wouldn't be sleeping with her. I didn't see you anywhere around when I did it, either. So why don't you just shut up?"

"I ought to turn you into a — " Aderno broke off most abruptly, as any man with a gram of sense would do when somebody aimed a Schmeisser at his belly button. Unlike people from Hasso's own world, he didn't know exactly what the weapon would do, but it had killed three Grenye, after all, so he was convinced it would do something dreadful. And he wasn't wrong, because it would.

"Don't mess with me," Hasso told him. "If you really can't stand this, go talk to the king. He gave you the job. Maybe he'll take you off it and assign me somebody civilized instead. But if you stay, you'll do what needs doing, and you'll do it the right way. What'll it be?"

Sometimes the Lenelli reminded Hasso of Germany's Balkan allies — a well-timed show of arrogance would put them in their place… for a while. "I don't want to bother the king," Aderno said. "I'll do what you ask of me."

"Good." Hasso hid a smile. He hadn't even had to threaten to sic Velona on the wizard. "First thing I want to do is talk to that drunk who lives with the Grenye."

Aderno blinked. "Why?" he squawked, quite humanly surprised.

"Because chances are he knows more about them than any three so-called experts here at the castle," Hasso answered. "And he'll know things they'd never think to try and find out."

By the look on Aderno's face, he found that none too wonderful. But then he remembered his promise and nodded. "Whatever you want," he said with a shrug. "I'll send some soldiers to haul him out of his sty and drag him over here. He'll likely think we aim to throw him in the dungeon — but the scare will serve him right."

Hasso shook his head. "No. I don't want to scare him. I want to win him over. No hauling, no dragging. I'll go to him."

"Into the Grenye quarter?" The wizard looked revolted.

Hasso only nodded. "Why not?" he said, and meant it. The Lenelli had fleas and lice, too. The Grenye were grubbier, but it was a difference of degree, not of kind. Before the war, Hasso would have hated how grubby he was himself. But after what he'd been through in the Wehrmacht, it was just one of those things.

Not to Aderno. "They are Grenye," he said, as if that explained everything. Velona had been just as thrilled about wearing Grenye boots, Hasso remembered. He couldn't have disgusted an SS man more by suggesting a walk through a ghetto.

He shrugged now. "The more we learn, the better the chance we have when King Bottero moves against Bucovin." Would Aderno be able to come up with an argument against that? Hasso would have bet the wizard couldn't, and he would have won his bet.

They plunged into the Grenye quarter that very afternoon. They went on foot; Hasso wanted to be as inconspicuous as he could. That wasn't very easy. He was fairer than any Grenye, and at least fifteen centimeters taller than most of them. And Aderno, who was both fairer and taller still, walked on tiptoe all the way, as if afraid he would pollute himself if he planted his feet squarely.

Here in their own district, the Grenye were bolder and noisier than at Castle Drammen. There they got very quiet whenever any Lenelli came into sight. Part of that was deference; part, Hasso judged, was fear. Among their own kind, the short, swarthy natives chattered and chaffered, both in the Lenello tongue and in what sounded like two or three of their own languages.

Hasso stopped in front of a plump man who was selling wickerwork baskets. "Where can I find Scanno?" he asked — that was the drunken Lenello's name.