Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

Zgomot came straight to the point, asking in Lenello, "So you will show us what you know?"

"I try to show you some of it, yes, Lord." Hasso picked his words with care. He wasn't sure he could make gunpowder. Even if he could, he wasn't sure it would work in this world. And even if it did, he was a long way from sure he wanted it to work for the Bucovinans.

"If you do what we hope you can do, you will not lack for anything we can give you," Zgomot said. "If things turn out otherwise… If things turn out otherwise, we will treat you the way you deserve. Do you understand me?"

"I do, Lord," Hasso answered. If he performed, he would get anything he wanted — except Velona. If he didn't, he would get the chopper. That seemed fair enough… to someone whose neck wasn't on the line. Hasso had to fight the impulse to rub at his nape.

Zgomot's eyes might be dark and pouchy, but they were also uncommonly shrewd. "I understand that you do not love us, Hasso Pemsel. This is not a bargain about love. We have treated you well when we did not need to. We hope you will repay us for our kindness."

"I hope you do, too, Lord." Hasso had to fight even harder to keep that hand away from the back of his neck.

He hoped this would be it, and he could see if he could get his hands on saltpeter and charcoal and sulfur. If he couldn't, he was, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed. But the Lord of Bucovin wasn't quite done with him yet. "The holy priestess" — he pointed toward Drepteaza with his chin — "tells me you have somewhat of the wizards' blood in you."

Hasso nodded to Zgomot. "So it would seem, Lord, though I am not trained in magic."

"I will give you a piece of advice some Lenelli" — Zgomot didn't say some other Lenelli, which was a kindness of sorts — "would have done well to heed. We have no magic. You know that. But if you use it against us here in Falticeni, it will do you less good than you think. Do you hear me?"

"Some Lenelli tell me the same thing, Lord," Hasso answered. Even Velona's goddess-given powers had weakened, though they hadn't failed, as she neared the capital of Bucovin. She didn't know why but she knew it was so.

"The Lenelli don't like it when we have a wizard in our midst. They think he makes us more dangerous to them," Zgomot said. "But we don't always like it, either, because a wizard in our midst is dangerous to us. So far, though, no Lenello wizard has managed to hold on to Bucovin longer than a month or so. Even wizards, we find, can't watch everyone all the time."

He was small and swarthy and dumpy. He was also clever and cynical, and probably made a damn good king. If he was considerate enough to warn Hasso, the German decided he ought to take that as a compliment. Bowing, he said, "I understand, Lord. I never want to be a king — or even a lord — myself."

"Few men do — at the beginning. They find the ambition grows on them after a while, though." Zgomot had a formidable deadpan. Hasso wouldn't have cared to play cards against him. He went on, "It's sad, but most of those men don't come to a good end. You wouldn't want to see that happen to yourself, would you?"

"Now that you mention it, no." Hasso tried to match dry for dry.

He must have succeeded, because one corner of Zgomot's mouth twitched upward before the Lord of Bucovin could pull his face straight again. "All right," the native said. "Do what you can do, and we will see what it is." With that less than ringing endorsement, he dismissed Hasso from his presence.

Charcoal was easy. Sulfur was manageable, anyhow. Hasso didn't know the Lenello name for it, but he described it well enough to let Drepteaza recognize it. "We use it in medicine, and we burn it to fumigate," she said. "It stinks."

"It sure does," Hasso agreed. "How do you say fumigate in Bucovinan?" They still used Lenello most of the time. He was more fluent in it, and he needed to be as precise as he could here. For that matter, he hadn't known how to say fumigate in Lenello till she told him, but context was clear there.

She told him. Literally, the word meant something like burn-to-stink-out-pests. German could paste small words together to make big ones. Bucovinan did it all the time. It also pasted on particles that weren't words in themselves, but that changed statements to questions or commands; showed past, present, or future; showed complete or incomplete action; and did lots of other things German would have handled with cases and verb endings. The language struck Hasso as clumsy, but it got the job done. He preferred Lenello not only because he knew it better — it also worked more like German.

Even in Lenello, he had a devil of a time getting across the idea of saltpeter. In the old days, in Europe, it had been a medicine to keep young men from getting horny. It probably worked as badly as any other medicine from the old days, but that was what people used it for before they found out about gunpowder… and afterwards, too.

In Europe. Neither the Lenelli nor the Bucovinans seemed to know about that. And Hasso didn't know what the stuff looked like in the wild, so to speak. He got frustrated. So did Drepteaza. "If you don't know how it looks or where to find it, how do you expect me to?" she asked pointedly.

"Scheisse," Hasso muttered. Swearing in German still gave him far more relief than either Lenello or Bucovinan. But saying shit made him remember one of the few things he did know about saltpeter. "Dungheaps! You find it in dungheaps! You know the crystals you find at the bottom of them sometimes? That's saltpeter." He had to cast about several times before he got Drepteaza to understand crystals, too.

When she did, though, she nodded. "All right. Now, at least, I know what you're talking about. I don't know how to say it in Lenello. In my language, it's — " The Bucovinan word meant shitflowers.

Hasso grinned and nodded. "I remember that one — I promise," he said. "Do you have any of it?"

"I don't think so," she answered. "It isn't good for anything." She paused. "Not for anything we know, anyway."

"Can you get me some?" he asked.

"I suppose so. Some temple servant will think I've gone mad when I tell him to fork up a dunghill, but I suppose so. How much do you need?"

If he remembered right, black powder was three-quarters saltpeter, a tenth sulfur, and the rest charcoal. If he didn't remember right, or somewhere close to right, he was dead meat. "If this works, as much as I can get. To show it works… Say, this much." He put both fists close together.

"You'll have it." Drepteaza looked bemused — and amused, too. "Who would have thought anybody wanted shitflowers? What else will you need?"

"A good balance, to weigh things on. And grinders — stone or wood, not metal."

"Why not metal?"

"If I strike a spark… Well, I don't want to strike a spark." If he was going into the gunpowder business in a big way, he wouldn't be able to do it all himself. He would have to make sure the natives didn't do anything stupid or careless, or they'd go sky-high. Even in modern Europe, munitions plants blew up every once in a while. But he'd finally found one good thing about the absence of tobacco, anyhow. Nobody'd drop a smoldering cigar butt into a powder barrel.

Then he had a really scary thought. Could a Lenello wizard touch off gunpowder from a distance? Would he have to figure out a spell to keep that from happening? If he did, if he could, would he be able to take the spell off again to use the powder on the battlefield?

His head started to hurt. This was all a hell of a lot more complicated than it would have been in Germany in, say, 1250.

What he was thinking must have shown on his face. "Is something wrong?" Drepteaza asked.

"I hope not," Hasso answered. For a while, Lenello wizards wouldn't be able to figure out what he was doing. He hadn't gone into any great detail about gunpowder back in Bottero's kingdom. One of the people he had talked with was Orosei, and the master-at-arms was too dead to give much away now.