Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

He wasn't astonished when the native turned out to know that tongue. "Come with me," the fellow said. "Your name is on a list. Lord Zgomot wanted to see certain folk if we captured them. Here you are, so he will see you."

"Here I am," Hasso agreed, so mournfully that Rautat laughed and the court official smiled a most unpleasant smile.

They led him down a hallway decorated with art of a sort he didn't think he'd ever seen before. For lack of a better name, he thought of the pieces as feather paintings. Some of them were quite realistic, others bands or swirling lines of color. They must have taken enormous labor to create, first in finding the feathers and then in arranging them.

"Nice work." Hasso pointed at one — a picture of the palace, done all in feathers. "Very pretty."

Rautat and the functionary both stared at him, then started to laugh. "By Lavtrig, now I know you're no ordinary big blond bastard! They all think featherwork is stupid and ugly and foolish because they don't do it themselves," Rautat said.

He spoke in Bucovinan to the soldiers escorting the Wehrmacht officer. They gaped at Hasso, too. Hasso couldn't remember any Lenelli ever talking about featherwork. It really must have been beneath their notice. He wondered why. It sure looked good to him.

Then they led him past what he first took to be a small elephant's tusk. But it was shaped more like a sword blade, and had a formidable point on the end. "What is that? What beast does it come from?" he asked.

"A dragon," Rautat answered matter-of-factly. "That is the greatest fang of the Dragon of Mizil, which we slew when Bucovin was young. His bones lie under the walls of Falticeni, and under the palace here."

"A dragon? What does a dragon look like?" Hasso asked.

They went on a little farther. Then the court functionary pointed to a big featherwork on the wall. "Behold the Dragon of Mizil!" he said.

Hasso beheld it. He wondered from which birds the natives had got those iridescent green and bronze feathers, or the yellow and orange and red ones that showed the fire it breathed. He also wondered whether the artists had actually seen the dragon or limned it from the stories of those who came before them. And he wondered… "How do you kill something like that?"

Together, Rautat and the court official burst into something between verse and song. After a moment, the rest of Hasso's guards joined in. Germans might have launched into "Deutschland uber Alles" or the "Ode to Joy" with as much ease and as little self-consciousness. Everybody in Falticeni had to know the story of the Dragon of Mizil.

Everybody but me, Hasso thought. And he didn't understand a word of Bucovinan. "Can you translate, please?" he said.

To his surprise, Rautat shook his head. "Not this," the soldier answered. "This is ours. This is special. This is not for Lenello dogfeet." He must have translated one of his own words literally, for he corrected himself a moment later: "Scoundrels." The palace flunky nodded agreement.

Hasso only shrugged. He was in no position to argue with them. They hadn't killed him. Except for when he went into the pit, they hadn't even hurt him. Yet. All things considered, he had to figure he was ahead of the game.

They turned a last corner. There was the throne room. There, on what looked like a dining-room chair wrapped in gold leaf, sat Lord Zgomot. The court official poked Hasso in the ribs with an elbow. "Bow!" he said.

Again, Hasso was in no position to argue. Bow he did. As he straightened, he sized up the ruler of Bucovin. King Bottero had put him in mind of Hermann Goring, Goring the way he had been before defeat and drugs diminished him: big, bold, swaggering, flamboyant, enjoying to the hilt the power that had landed in his lap.

Zgomot, by contrast, wore a mink coat that would have made Marlene Dietrich jealous, but still looked like nothing so much as the druggist in a small Romanian town. He was small himself, and skinny, with a pinched face, a beak of a nose, and a black beard streaked with gray.

His eyebrows were thick and black, too, and almost met in the middle. The dark eyes under them, though, seemed disconcertingly shrewd. He was taking Hasso's measure as Hasso studied him.

"So… You are the strange one, the one from nowhere, of whom we have heard." Unlike Rautat's or the functionary's, Zgomot's Lenello was almost perfect. The only hint that he wasn't a native speaker was the extremely precise way in which he expressed himself. He wasn't at ease in the language, as Bottero or Velona or Orosei would have been.

Poor Orosei, Hasso thought. He was glad the king and the goddess — the king and his lover — had got away. He wished like hell he'd got away himself.

But he damn well hadn't. And now he had to deal with this native — who was no doubt trying to figure out how to deal with him. "Yes, Lord," he said: he was who Zgomot claimed he was.

The Lord of Bucovin pursed his lips. He didn't look like a happy man, the way Bottero usually did. He had the air of someone whose stomach pained him. "Are you as dangerous as people say you are?" he asked.

"I don't know, your Majesty. How dangerous do people say I am?" Hasso answered.

"Don't you be insolent!" the palace official snapped.

"He is not being insolent," Zgomot said. "Most people never know what others say about them behind their back."

So there, Hasso thought. He got the idea lying to Zgomot wouldn't be smart, not if you had any chance of getting caught later on. "Lord, I don't know how dangerous I am. After I come here, I try to serve King Bottero as best I can, that's all," he said.

"You had the thunder weapon, yes?" Zgomot said. "You almost killed me with it in the first fight, yes?"

"Yes," Hasso admitted.

"And you're the one who came up with the column to strike with, yes?" the Lord of Bucovin persisted.

"Yes," Hasso said again, wondering if he was cooking his own goose.

"Then you're dangerous." Zgomot spoke in tones that brooked no contradiction. He eyed Hasso. "If you'd come here — to this place — in Bucovin instead of where you did, would you have served me as best you could instead of that big pig of a Bottero?"

You wouldn't have had Velona to persuade me. Persuade! Ha! That's a word! But if I'd come down by Falticeni, I wouldn't have known anything about Velona. And what a shame that would have been! The thoughts flickered through Hasso's mind in a fraction of a second. "I don't know, Lord. Probably," he replied aloud. "Unless your people kill me for being a Lenello, I mean."

"Chance you take when you're big and blond," Zgomot observed, his smile thin to the point of starvation. How big an inferiority complex did the Grenye carry? How could you blame them if it was about the size of the dragon whose fang they so proudly displayed? The Lord of Bucovin went on, "Since you are here now, will you serve me the way you served Bottero even though he didn't deserve you?"

This time, Hasso didn't answer right away. The easiest thing to do was say yes and then do his best to get away or minimize his contributions. But he remembered again what he thought of Field Marshal Paulus. And he knew what Wehrmacht troops thought of the Russians who fought for the Reich. You might use them — you might use them up — but you'd never, ever trust them.

Slowly, he said, "Lord, I am King Bottero's sworn man. How can I serve his enemy?" He wondered if he'd just written his own obituary.

"A good many Lenelli have no trouble at all." Zgomot's voice was dryer than a sandstorm in the Sahara. "We do keep an eye on them, but they're mostly so happy to stay alive that they show us whatever they can. We've learned a lot from them."

"Would you let one of them do anything really important?" Hasso asked.

Now the Lord of Bucovin hesitated. "Mm — maybe not," he said at last.