Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

And I didn't think of it, either, he reminded himself as he swung up onto the scrubby little horse they were letting him ride. He muttered angrily in German. He'd been Bottero's spymaster, and he'd been better at the job than any Lenello ever born. But he hadn't been good enough. How many just like Rautat were there, in all the Lenello kingdoms? Hundreds? Thousands?

"What is that tongue you used? It's not Lenello," Rautat said. How many of those Grenye were as sharp as he was? Probably very few.

"No. It's my own language," Hasso answered. "I'm not a Lenello."

"You look like one," Rautat told him. Hasso shrugged. The dark little man plucked at his curly beard. "You don't sound like one, I will say." He took a scrap of parchment, a reed pen, and a little clay flask of ink from a belt pouch and scribbled a note to himself. Seeing Hasso's eyes on him, he said, "I learned your letters when I was in Drammen, too. We mostly use them now."

"Yes, I know that," Hasso said. The crude warning the Bucovinans posted had used Lenello characters and, indeed, the Lenello language.

"We had writing of our own before you big blond bastards came." Rautat sounded like a man anxious to prove he wasn't a savage and half afraid he was in spite of everything. "Your way is a lot quicker to pick up, though. It's mostly the priests who still write the old characters. They take years to learn, and who else has the time?"

How had the natives written in the old days? Hieroglyphics? Things like Chinese characters? Some slow, clumsy, cumbersome system, anyhow. One of these days, chances were even the priests wouldn't use it any more. And then who would be able to read the accumulated wisdom of Bucovin, assuming there was any?

Rautat cocked his head to one side and eyed Hasso like a curious sparrow. "So you're not a Lenello, eh? Where are you from, then? Some other kingdom across the sea, I suppose."

"No. Farther away than that." Hasso told how he'd come to this world.

What would the Bucovinan make of it? Hasso knew what a German Feldwebel — for he took Rautat to be a top sergeant, more or less — would have made of it, even if the fellow had worked in Cleveland for a while. The Feld would have laughed his ass off and said, "Bullshit!" Hearing a story like that, Hasso would have said the same thing himself.

But this was a different place. Rautat frowned. It wasn't that he disbelieved; he was trying to figure out how the pieces fit together. Well, Hasso had been doing that ever since he splashed down into the marsh. He didn't have all the answers yet, and he would have bet anything that Rautat wouldn't, either.

The native pointed at him. "So you're the whoreson who spat thunder and lightning at us in the first big battle! That's why we worked so hard to find your name!"

"Ja, that's me," Hasso said, and then, "Ja means yes."

"No wonder they want you in Falticeni," Rautat said. "Can you do that some more?"

"No. My weapon needs cartridges'' Again, a word came out in German — it had to. "They come with me from my world. The Lenelli know more tricks of making things than you people do, yes? Well, the folk of my world know more than the Lenelli do. The Lenelli can't make these cartridges. No one here can."

"Ah." As a wily Feldwebel would, Rautat had a good poker face. He sounded almost artistically casual as he asked, "Can you teach us any of what you know and the Lenelli don't?"

"I don't know," Hasso answered, trying to keep worry out of his own voice. "I'm not sure."

He could show the natives this and that. He could show them most of the same things he would have shown to Bottero and Velona. He could, yes, but should he? He knew what he thought of Field Marshal Paulus, who'd surrendered to the Russians at Stalingrad and then got on the radio for them, telling the Germans they couldn't win and had better give up while they still had the chance. Maybe Paulus did persuade a few Landsers to desert. To Hasso and the rest, though, he was nothing but a goddamn traitor.

Of course, maybe the NKVD held Paulus' feet to the fire before he started broadcasting. And maybe the Bucovinans will hold my feet to the fire. What do I do then?

Hasso had an Iron Cross First Class. If you'd lived through the whole war, it was hard not to have one. He'd been put up for the Knight's Cross, but it didn't go through for some dumb reason or another. He didn't much care. He'd never thought of himself as heroic. He wanted to live. Would he have plomped his butt down on the Omphalos stone if he were bound and determined to die for the Vaterlandl

He also wanted to be able to go on looking at himself in the mirror, even if mirrors in this world were sorry things of polished bronze. He'd taken service with Bottero, who could have carved a stranger into strips and fed him to his hounds. And he'd fallen in love with Velona, even if the word scared him and her both.

If any place in this world was, Bottero's kingdom was his country now. I'll escape if I can, Hasso told himself. Even under the Geneva Convention, that's my duty.

The Ivans hadn't signed the Geneva Convention. The Lenelli and the Bucovinans had never heard of it, never even imagined it.

Rautat took out a little knife and started cleaning under his nails with the tip. The watery late-autumn sun flashed off the sharp edge. What else could that knife do? Anything the bastard holding it wanted it to, that was what. The day wasn't too cold. Hasso shivered anyway.

He wasn't the only captive heading back to Falticeni. Every so often, he passed other big blond men on the road with large guard contingents. They traveled on foot, in small groups, hands tied behind them and left legs bound one to another. They eyed him as he rode past. Rautat wouldn't let him talk with them. He didn't suppose he could blame the Bucovinan, things being as they were.

"What do you do with these men?" he asked after his mounted party went by another group of Lenello prisoners.

"Use them," Rautat answered. "They work for us. They teach us things. If they settle down and behave, they live better with us than they would in their own kingdom."

At the price of exile, of course. Still, when the other choice was getting your throat cut or worse… But Hasso also remembered Scanno, who even in Drammen preferred the company of Grenye to his own folk. Scanno wouldn't be the only Lenello who thought that way, either. There might not be many, but there were bound to be some.

And Hasso also thought about Japan after the Western powers made it open up in the nineteenth century. What did the world look like to the Japanese then? The little yellow men had to acquire all the skills they lacked, and in a hurry, too, or else go under like the Indians and Africans. And they did it. They smashed the Russians in 1905 — which made Hasso jealous — and they were giving the Americans all they wanted now. The Grenye of Bucovin were in the same boat.

But the Japanese could acquire all the tricks the Americans and British and Russians and French and Germans knew. The Grenye found themselves behind the eight-ball in a way the Japanese didn't. "Have you got any Lenello wizards in Falticeni?" Hasso asked, not least to see if he could make Rautat twitch.

He didn't. The native just shook his head. "Not right now. For us, wizards are like holding a sword by the blade. We can cut ourselves, not just the enemy. Somebody who can make spells is liable to try to rule us, not to do what we want. It's happened before."

Obviously, it hadn't worked. "How do you — how did you — stop that?" Hasso inquired, genuinely curious.

Rautat shrugged. "We killed them. Not easy, not cheap, but we did it. Even a wizard has to sleep some of the time."

"Er — right," Hasso said. The Man Who Would Be King — he'd read the Kipling tale in translation — didn't have an easy time of it no matter who the natives were. One of you, lots of them. As long as they don't believe you're a god, they can get you. And even if they start out thinking you are, pretty soon they'll change their minds.