Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

Somebody yelled something at him. He didn't understand all of it, but he heard something about his mother and something about his dog. Englishmen called somebody they didn't like a son of a bitch. Whatever this endearment was, it seemed based on the same principle.

Hasso pointed to a tavern. "A mug of beer to me, please?" he said.

"For me, you mean," Rautat said. He spoke to the troopers with them. A pike-man went over and stuck his head into the tavern.

"No," he said when he came back. "One of those big blond buggers is already in there swilling."

"Drepteaza would — " Rautat spook too fast for Hasso to follow. When he said so, the underofficer slowed down: "She would murder me if I let you gab with another Lenello. There. You got that?"

"Yes, but I am no Lenello," Hasso said — one more time.

Rautat looked up at him — up and up. "Close enough, buddy."

Hasso didn't find any answer for that. The Ivans wouldn't care that a man they captured from the Wiking SS panzer division was born in Norway rather than Germany. They'd knock the poor bastard over the head anyhow. He reminded himself again that he ought to thank God, or maybe the goddess, the Bucovinans hadn't done that to him.

"Am another tavern not far from?" he asked. "I have thirsty."

"You talk as bad as a Lenello would, too," Rautat said, laughing. But he knew where the next closest tavern stood. Hasso hadn't expected anything else. Rautat struck him as the sort who would know such things. Like any old soldier, the native had the knack for making himself at home wherever he went.

Ducking to get through the low door, Hasso found himself in what was plainly a soldiers' dive. A considerable silence fell when he went in. Again, Rautat talked too fast for Hasso to follow. Whatever he said, it must have worked, because the men in there didn't leap up and go for the Wehrmacht officer, and a good many of them had plainly wanted to do just that.

Then Rautat talked to the tapman: "Beer for him, and beer for me, too." That Hasso understood — it was important, after all.

The tapman held out his hand, palm up. Rautat crossed it with copper. Lenello coins were pretty crude, at least by the standards Hasso was used to. Bucovinan coins, being cruder imitations of crude originals… But as long as the natives didn't fuss, it wasn't his worry.

"Here." Rautat perched on a stool by an empty table. He waved Hasso to another one. A couple of the German's watchdogs also sat down. The rest hovered over him. Like the rest of the men in here, they probably would have been happier to kill him than to guard him. But they followed orders. If they intimidated him while he drank, chances were they didn't mind.

A barmaid brought the beers. She smiled at Rautat and looked at Hasso… yes, as if he were a tiger out of its cage. The rest of the guards ordered beer, too, except for one who chose mead instead. The barmaid seemed glad to get away.

"To your health," Rautat said to Hasso, raising his mug.

"To your health," Hasso echoed, returning the gesture. They both drank. The beer was better than what they'd given him in his cell, but not much. To somebody used to good German beer, what the Lenelli and the Bucovinans made mostly tasted like sour horsepiss. You could drink it if you had to, though, so he did. Drink water here, as in Russia, and you begged for dysentery.

Why didn't the damn wizards do something about that? Hasso's guess was that if they tried they'd be too busy to do anything else.

One of the soldiers already in the tavern came up to Hasso and unloaded a torrent of gibberish on him. "Sorry, not understand," he said, and then, to Rautat, "What does he say?"

"Nothing you want to hear," the underofficer answered in Lenello. "What a rotten dog you are and how he'd like to carve chunks off your liver and eat them raw."

"Tell him I'm insulted," Hasso said in the same language. "Tell him the least he could do is cook them first."

Rautat translated that. Hasso wondered whether he would get a laugh or start a fight. He outweighed the native by close to thirty kilos, so brawling didn't seem fair. But he didn't intend to let the Bucovinan pound on him without hitting back.

The soldier stared at Rautat, then stared at him. "He said that?" the man said; Hasso had no trouble at all following him. Then the fellow started to chuckle, and he said something the Wehrmacht officer didn't understand before going back to his own table.

"What was that?" Hasso asked Rautat.

In Lenello, Rautat answered, "He said you may be a big blond bastard, but you may almost be a human being, too."

"Thank you," Hasso said, deadpan, putting the polite particle at the end. Rautat broke up. Hasso took another pull at his mug of beer. The Grenye were recognizable human beings, too, even if they couldn't work magic — maybe especially because they couldn't.

When Rautat and the rest of the guards brought Hasso back to the palace, he got a surprise. While he was gone, the servants had cleaned up his cell and taken out the nasty straw pallet, replacing it with a wool-stuffed mattress on a wooden frame with leather lashings. They'd given him a stool and a basin and pitcher — and a brazier, to fight the freezing breezes that howled in through the window. Now it was a real room — almost.

He bowed to Rautat. "Thank you," he said again, this time with the polite particle in front to show he was sincere.

"Don't — it wasn't my idea." Rautat repeated himself till Hasso understood, then added, "If you want to thank anybody, thank the priestess. She's in charge of stuff like this." Again, he doubled back till the German got it.

"I do that," Hasso said.

He didn't get a chance till late in the afternoon. He spent some of the time in between asleep on the nice, new mattress. All too soon, it would be full of bugs, as the old one had been. He didn't like that, but after more than five years of war in Europe he didn't think it was the end of the world, either. He'd been lousy and fleabitten and bedbug-bedeviled before. You itched, you scratched, you killed what you could, and you got on with your life.

When Drepteaza came in — accompanied, as usual, by tough little Bucovinan guards — he bowed lower to her than he had to Rautat. "I thank you," he said, the polite particle properly in front, and waved to show why he was thanking her.

The native soldiers laughed at him. Drepteaza smiled, "You say, 'I thank you'" she told him, using the feminine form of the pronoun. Hasso swore in German, which made him feel better and didn't offend anybody here, and thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. Too goddamn much stuff to remember! Drepteaza went on, "And I say that you are welcome. You will be here a while. You may as well be comfortable."

He doubted he would ever be comfortable in this world. The twentieth century had too much that simply didn't exist here. Electricity, hot and cold running water, refrigeration, glazed windows, phonographs and photographs, radios, cars… But, again, he'd done without most of that stuff for years. You didn't have to have it, the way so many people thought you did. Life was nicer with it, sure, but you could manage without.

"And you'll earn these things," the priestess said. "We do expect to learn from you, you know." She repeated herself in Lenello so he could have no doubt about what she meant.

"I understand," he answered, which wasn't the same as promising to deliver. Whatever he gave the Bucovinans would hurt the Lenelli. The hope that he would give them things that would hurt the Lenelli was the only reason the natives hadn't murdered him instead of taking him prisoner.

Drepteaza eyed him shrewdly. "You understand, but you don't want to do it. Plenty of real Lenelli do, and you aren't one."

You're just as foreign there as you are here, so why not help us? That was what she meant, all right. She wasn't quite right, though. Hasso felt more at home among the Lenelli than he did here, and he doubted things would have been different had he landed here first. The Lenelli came closer to thinking the way he did. They were conquerors. They were winners. Bucovin was a land trying to figure out how not to lose. It wasn't the same.