Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

"Is it something to do with magic?" she asked.

Hasso jumped. He couldn't help it. "How do you know that?" His poker face wasn't as good as Lord Zgomot's, but he didn't like to think anybody — let alone a native — could read him so well.

Drepteaza's smile lifted only one corner of her mouth. "When we worry about things going wrong, we worry about magic. Why should you be any different?" It always worked against her folk. The Lenelli didn't look at things the same way. But then, magic worked for them.

"Maybe I should teach you fighting tricks you can use right away, and not this," Hasso said. "This takes some time before it turns into anything."

"When it does, it will be important, won't it?"

"I hope so," Hasso answered, trying not to think about wizards wreaking havoc on gunpowder once he'd made it.

"Then do this," Drepteaza said firmly. "Do the other, too, but do this. I don't know what it will be, but I want to find out."

"I have the charcoal. I have the sulfur. I am just waiting for the shitflowers." Hasso enjoyed the word.

Drepteaza took it for granted. Both the Lenelli and the Bucovinans were earthier folk than Germans. They didn't flush bodily wastes down the drain — they had to deal with them. In the field, so did Hasso. He'd covered up like a cat when he could and just left things where they were when he couldn't. But a city full of people couldn't very well do that, not unless it wanted to get buried in waste.

He supposed the crystals the natives gave him were saltpeter. They certainly stank of the dungheap. But if the locals gave him something else by mistake or to test him, he wouldn't have known the difference. He washed the crystals and got rid of the filthy, scummy stuff that floated on top of the water.

But he also discovered he was getting rid of a lot of the saltpeter, because it dissolved in water. So he couldn't just pour out the water. He had to skim off the scum and then boil the water to get back what had gone away. Drepteaza watched in fascination as he worked. "Were you ever an apothecary?" she asked. "You have the touch."

Hasso shook his head. "It would be nice. Then I would have a better idea of what I'm doing."

"If you don't know, no one does."

"That's what I'm afraid of," he answered.

He ground a little of the saltpeter, the charcoal, and the sulfur very fine and mixed them together, then touched them off with a flame. They burned enthusiastically, but not so well as he'd hoped. He mixed up another small batch, wet it, and kneaded the mixture into a paste. Then he let it dry and ground it again, being very careful not to do anything that could make a spark.

Once he finished, he had enough powder to fill a fat firecracker. The only problem was, the natives didn't have cardboard to make a firecracker casing. (Neither did the Lenelli.) After some thought, Hasso asked for thin leather. Drepteaza had trouble containing her amusement as she watched him struggle to put together the case. "You may make a good apothecary, but you were never a glover or anything like that."

Shakespeare's father was a glover. Hasso didn't know how he knew that, but he did. Knowing it was useless back in his old world, and worse than useless here. He gave Drepteaza an irritated look. "And so?"

"And so you ought to have someone else do the work instead of trying to do it all yourself," she answered. "You know what you want to do. Let other people do what they know how to do."

He was flabbergasted, not least because she was so obviously right. He knew lots of things the Bucovinans didn't. He'd let that blind him to an obvious truth: they knew lots of things he didn't, too. One of their artisans would have taken twenty minutes to deal with what was costing him a day's worth of work and turning out crappy.

Maybe Drepteaza knew a fine leatherworker herself. Maybe she asked one of Lord Zgomot's servants for a name. However she did it, she found a Grenye with a nearsighted squint who was miraculously capable with a knife and a needle. Drepteaza translated for Hasso, explaining exactly what he wanted.

"I'll do it," the glover said. Hasso understood that bit of Bucovinan just fine. It took the man longer than twenty minutes, but not much. His stitches were as tiny and as close together and as perfectly matched as a sewing machine's might have been.

The glover watched with interest as Hasso used a clay funnel from the kitchens to fill the case with powder. After the Wehrmacht officer had done that, he told Drepteaza, "Now he can sew up almost all of the opening at the top."

"Why not all of it?" the glover asked. Then he brightened, finding an answer of his own: "Is this thing a suppository?" Drepteaza translated the question with a straight face.

If you stuck it up there and touched it off, it would get rid of your hemorrhoids, all right — assuming it worked. Imagining that, Hasso started to giggle. He couldn't explain why. None of the natives had seen gunpowder in action.

"Just tell him no," he replied, as matter-of-factly as he could.

"How will you make it do whatever it does without hurting yourself?" Drepteaza asked after she told the glover no. She might not have seen gunpowder, but she had a good eye for the possibilities.

"I need to make a fuse" Hasso said. The key word necessarily came out in German. If gunpowder caught on here — and if I live long enough, he thought — the technical terms would be in a very foreign language.

In the Wehrmacht, fuses came in two flavors — timed, which burned at about a meter a minute, and instantaneous, which burned at about forty meters a second. You could improvise a fuse with powder and cord, but it would burn pretty damn quick. Hasso didn't know how to make timed fuse. He didn't think the Bucovinans would let him spend very long experimenting, either. He wouldn't have if he were Lord Zgomot.

And so he did some more improvising. He rubbed gunpowder into about a meter of cord, and put the end of that into the leather case holding the rest of his charge. Then he attached the other end to a length of candle wick, which would have to do duty for timed fuse.

He borrowed a toy wagon and a couple of little wooden soldiers and set them near the charge. Everything sat on the bare rammed-earth floor of a palace storeroom. Lord Zgomot, Drepteaza, and Rautat were the only witnesses when Hasso lit the wick and hastily stepped out of the room.

"It makes a loud bang — don't be afraid," he said. I hope like hell it does. They'll hang me up by the balls if it doesn't.

Rautat nodded. "You can say that again. If it's like your thunder weapon, it'll go blam! Blam! Blam!"

"Only once," Hasso said. "Thunder weapon is all used up. Can't make anything like that — too hard. Too hard for Lenelli, too. They — "

Boom! The explosion interrupted him. Rautat flinched. Lord Zgomot jumped. Drepteaza opened her mouth, but she didn't let out a squeak. Neither did the two men. The Bucovinans had nerve, all right.

"Let's see what it does," Hasso said.

Before they could, several servants came running up to find out what the demon had happened. They'd never heard a boom like that before. Lord Zgomot sent them away. Hasso couldn't follow most of what he said, but it sounded reassuring. He seemed to have a knack for giving people what they needed.

After the servants went away, Hasso and his comrades walked into the storeroom. Rautat wrinkled his nose. "Smells like devils," he said. Hasso thought the brimstone reek smelled like fireworks. It didn't smell like war to him; the odor of smokeless powder was different, sharper.

The toy wagon lay on its side near one wall. One of the wooden dolls wasn't far away. The other one was in pieces on the other side of the room. Only a couple of tattered scraps were left of the leather sack that had held the gunpowder.