Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

The Lenelli looked down their noses at Grenye. That the Grenye might look up their noses at the Lenelli — they weren't tall enough to look down them — hadn't crossed Hasso's mind. The Lenelli, after all, looked like Aryans. Of course they were better than these little swarthy people… weren't they?

Didn't he himself want to sleep with Drepteaza more in spite of her looks than because of them? Well, yes and no. Yes, she was small and dark. But she was also very pretty and, as he knew from the baths, made just the way a woman ought to be. Maybe she was built no better than Leneshul. Even so, she was a hundred times as interesting — which had nothing to do with looks.

"You don't say anything," Drepteaza remarked.

"What am I supposed to say? I already say too much," Hasso answered.

She sent him a wry smile. "You're no Lenello, regardless of how you look. If you were, you would be telling me how wonderful you were and what an honor it would be for me to open my legs for you."

Hasso's ears felt on fire. Well-bred women in Germany didn't talk about opening their legs even after you propositioned them. They might do it, but they didn't talk about it so baldly. He tried to match her tone: "If you don't already know I am wonderful, what can I say to make you believe it?"

"Probably nothing." Few German women had Drepteaza's devastating honesty, either. She went on, "I look at you, and I see things like Muresh. I see a countryside full of massacres like that, from here all the way west to the seacoast. And I should be honored to sleep with you?" She shuddered.

She might as well be a Jew looking at an SS man, Hasso thought. He did some shuddering of his own. The SS was bound to be out of business now. The Jews who were left in Europe, and the Jews from America and Russia, were having their turn. Hasso didn't — couldn't — know what was going on in the Reich now in the aftermath of a lost war, but he wasn't sorry not to be there to see it. Hard times: he was sure of that.

And if the Jews were taking revenge, could the Grenye of Bucovin do the same? The Jews hadn't had to worry about magic. Oh, some of the Nazi bigwigs dabbled in the occult, but it sure didn't do them a pfennig's worth of good. It was real here, though — no doubt about it. And I'm helping these dark little mindblind…?

If I want to keep on living, I am.

Besides… "No matter what I look like, I am not a Lenello," Hasso said carefully.

"Yes, so you keep insisting, and it seems to be true. But you still look like one, so it helps you less than you think even if it is." The skin at the corners of Drepteaza's eyes crinkled; the ends of her mouth turned up the tiniest bit. "And we both know a man will say anything at all to coax a woman into bed with him."

"What?" Hasso did his best to look comically astonished.

It must have worked — Drepteaza burst out laughing, which didn't happen every day, or every week, either. She wagged a finger at him. "You are a wicked man. Wicked, I tell you."

Most of her was kidding; she made that plain enough. But down underneath, at some level, she had to mean it. And so Hasso couldn't just go on with the joke and say something like, At your service. Instead, he said, "Well, the Lenelli think so, too."

"Yes." The priestess sent him a hooded look. "And it could be, couldn't it, that all of us are right?"

A blizzard roared in that afternoon. If anything, it came as a relief to Hasso. It took his mind off the foot he'd stuck in his mouth, anyway. Listening to the wind wail, watching it blow snow past almost horizontally, reminded him there were bigger things in the world than his own foolishness. For a while that morning, he hadn't been so sure.

Then his nose started to freeze, so he quit watching the blowing snow. It wasn't anything he hadn't seen before — that was for damn sure. Next to some of the blizzards he'd seen in Russia and Poland, this one was no more than a plucky amateur.

He wondered how soon he'd regret telling Leneshul to get lost. Then he didn't wonder any more: he'd regret it as soon as he got horny again. That was as plain as the — chilly — nose on his face.

But, dammit, she wasn't what he wanted. Yeah, any pussy was better than none, but he missed Velona. There was a woman and a half — well, more than a woman and a half, when you got right down to it. A woman and a goddess.

Drepteaza wasn't a woman and a half. She was so short, she hardly seemed one whole woman. But she was, and then some. And so? So she didn't want him.

"I can't win," he muttered. Maybe she was a lousy lay. Maybe she'd think he was a lousy lay. Maybe they just wouldn't work. Maybe I'm trying to tell myself the grapes are sour because I don't get to taste them. Aesop was no dummy. He knew how things worked, all right.

A Lenello woman came in with his supper. Mutton stew, it smelled like, and heavy on the garlic. He didn't much care for garlic, but the Bucovinans put it in everything this side of beer. The pitcher of beer wouldn't be anything to write home about, either — as if he could write home from here. Then again, the natives could have boiled him in beer and shoved garlic cloves up his ass, so how could he complain?

"Good day," the serving girl said in Lenello.

"Good day," Hasso answered in his bad Bucovinan.

"You have heard about the trouble?" she asked. Most of the people who dealt with him here knew more Lenello than he did. Back when the German tribes bumped up against Rome, how many Goths and Franks would have spoken Latin? Quite a few, probably.

"No. What trouble?" Hasso stuck to Bucovinan — he needed the practice. He was also out of the gossip loop. No surprise — he was a foreigner who didn't speak any known language very well.

Still in Lenello, the serving woman said, "Your people attack our border villages again. Much burning. Much killing."

"My people? I have no people here," Hasso said.

She looked at him as if he were an idiot. That had to be what she was thinking, too. "King Bottero's people," she said, speaking slowly and plainly. "You are from King Bottero's kingdom, yes?"

Hasso couldn't even say no. That had been his local address till the Bucovinans captured him. Even so, he told the serving woman the same thing he'd told Drepteaza: "I am not a Lenello."

Drepteaza listened to him. Drepteaza appreciated subtleties. Even Rautat recognized the possibility that he might be different from the rest of Bottero's men. The serving woman just sniffed. "You look like a Lenello. You come from Bottero's kingdom. What are you supposed to be, a parsnip?" She walked out of the room without giving him a chance to answer.

"Ja. A goddamn parsnip," he said in German. "What am I supposed to be? God, I wish I knew." He poured beer from the pitcher into a mug. She hadn't given him enough to get drunk on. The Grenye of Bucovin didn't get smashed every chance they could, the way so many Grenye in the Lenello kingdoms seemed to. These natives didn't have to measure themselves against the big, blond, magic-using invaders every hour of the day, every day of the week. They still kept some sense of their own worth.

He ate the stew. Damned if it didn't have parsnips in it. So now he was part parsnip, anyhow. He put more charcoal on the brazier, crawled under his furs and blankets, and went to bed. What else did he have to do when he wasn't making gunpowder? He hadn't taken a woman: not Leneshul, not Drepteaza, not even this snippy servant. He hoped Aderno and Velona wouldn't hound him in his dreams. After everything else today, that would have been too much, even if he lived through it.

They didn't. He got a full night's sleep — or most of one, anyway. Somebody banged on his door before the sun came up the next morning. When he opened it, Rautat stood in the hallway. "Can you use your gunpowder against the Lenelli?" he asked. The German word sounded odd in his mouth. "Have you got enough?"