Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

"Do I have a choice?" Hasso said. "If I do, I'd rather not."

Rautat scowled. "You better talk to Lord Zgomot. He sent me."

People who ran stuff didn't like you to tell them no. It didn't matter whether you called them lord or king or Fuhrer — they still didn't like it for beans. Stories about Hitler's tantrums — even his carpet-chewing — made the whispered rounds in Germany. When you said no to Bottero, he could look as if he wanted to pinch your head off.

And as for Lord Zgomot… well, he just looked mournful. "We have some of this thing. It is, for once, a thing the Lenelli have not got. Why not use it against them, then?"

"Lord, if you order, I use it," Hasso said — he didn't want to push his luck too far. "But this is not the best time."

"They are on our land again," Zgomot said. "They are killing and raping and robbing, the way they do. Why is this a bad time?" His tone said Hasso had better have himself some goddamn good reasons.

And Hasso thought he did. He ticked them off on his fingers as he spoke: "First, Lord, not much gunpowder yet. We have more later." The Lord of Bucovin nodded impatiently — he knew that. Hasso went on, "Second thing is, better not to let Lenelli know what you have too soon, yes? These are raids, yes? Better to use gunpowder in big fight, get big win, not let them see what it does till too late."

He wished he could talk better. Even in Lenello, he sounded like a jerk to himself. Why should Zgomot take him seriously if he sounded like a jerk? And it was a good thing he didn't have to try to speak Bucovinan. He was better at it than he had been when he got to Falticeni, which meant — dismayingly little, when you came right down to it. He still needed to go some to get to sound like a jerk in Bucovinan.

Lord Zgomot sat lonely on his throne, thinking things over. Torches crackled as they burned in their sconces. Fat candles glowed to either side of the high seat. All the same, in the predawn stillness the throne room was a cold, dark, drafty place. Torches and candles couldn't push darkness back the way lightbulbs did.

At last, the Lord of Bucovin sighed. It was cold enough in there to let Hasso see his breath smoke. "You make more sense than I wish you did," he said, speaking slowly and carefully — Hasso remembered Lenello was a foreign language for him, too. "Let it be as you say. I will move against the bandits with ordinary soldiers, as we have already begun to do."

Hasso bowed. "You are wise, Lord."

"Am I?" Zgomot's tone was as bleak and wintry as the air inside the throne room. "You know I do not trust you completely, or even very far. You know I wonder if you do not want to use the gunpowder because you fear it will hurt the Lenelli and you are still loyal to them in your heart."

He was uncommonly blunt — scarily blunt, in fact. The dagger of ice that went up Hasso's back had nothing to do with the cold in here. "It is not so," the Wehrmacht officer insisted. "I want to hurt them more. I am sorry it needs to be later. This is not a big enough field to do it the good way, the, uh, right way."

"So you say." Zgomot leaned forward a little to eye him more closely. "So you say, when you lay with the Lenello goddess and our priestess does not care to lie with you. Never mind that you are tall and fair and they are tall and fair and we are not so tall and not so fair. Woman trouble will turn a man towards one side and against the other as easily as anything else. More easily than a lot of things."

Hasso thought of Helen of Troy, and of Brunhilde. Zgomot wasn't wrong, not speaking generally. And Hasso longed for Velona the way the tongue longs for a tooth after it got pulled. Never mind that it was hurting you. The tongue still wanted it to be there, wanted things to go on as they always had. It won't happen, tongue, Hasso thought.

"Velona tries to kill me now twice in my dreams," he told the Lord of Bucovin.

"So you say."

"Yes, Lord. So I say. If I am a liar about this, I am a liar about everything."

"That thought has also crossed my mind." Zgomot's voice grew more wintry than ever. "And what about Drepteaza, Hasso Pemsel?"

"Why ask me? Why not ask her?" Hasso spread his hands. "A woman who does it but doesn't want to… Not much fun in that. I think it's a shame — that is no lie. But what can I do?"

"No, you are not a Lenello," Zgomot said, as several Bucovinans had before him. Hasso waited to find out why the sovereign didn't think so. He didn't have to wait long. Zgomot continued, "Most of the big blond bastards — excuse me — force our women for the fun of it. We have seen that. I daresay you have seen it, too."

"Yes, I see that." Hasso admitted what he could scarcely deny. He might have argued that it wasn't true of most Lenelli, but he knew it was true of enough to make Zgomot's point for him.

"Maybe, in this snow, we can ambush a raiding party…" Careful and methodical, the Lord of Bucovin started making plans to deal with the enemy even if he couldn't do it the way he'd wanted.

The Lenelli didn't understand why they had trouble beating Bucovin when so many other Grenye kingdoms fell at the first shove. Hasso wondered whether Zgomot's father and grandfather were as clever as he was. That might go a long way towards explaining things.

And why did magic have more trouble the closer you got to Falticeni? Hasso didn't know. Neither did the Lenelli. Obviously, neither did the Bucovinans. There had to be a reason. How would you go about finding out? A real wizard might know. Hasso hadn't the faintest idea.

Maybe he was lucky such things didn't work so well here. Maybe that had helped keep Velona and Aderno from cooking his brains in his dream. He had no idea how to go about learning whether that was so, either.

Lord Zgomot seemed to remember he was there. "You may go, Hasso Pemsel. For better or worse, you persuaded me. You persuaded me you aren't deliberately lying to help Bottero's men, anyhow. I am not sure you are right, but I am not sure you are wrong, either, so I will take your advice."

King Bottero might or might not have listened to him. Whether he did or not, he wouldn't have analyzed things so carefully. Hitler… Telling Hitler no wasn't a good idea. Of course, telling him yes might not be a good idea, either, because he often demanded the impossible.

Hasso got out of the throne room as inconspicuously as he could. When you were a big blond in a land full of squat brunets, that wasn't very. Lord Zgomot's guards and his courtiers all followed him with their eyes till he was gone.

One thing Zgomot hadn't asked him to do once gunpowder was out of the picture: he hadn't asked him to go to Bucovin's western marches and either fight against the Lenelli or use his magic against them. Why not? An obvious question with an only too obvious answer. He doesn't trust me that far. He said so himself.

He almost turned back and volunteered to go fight the Lenelli, with bare hands if need be. But he knew Zgomot would turn him down, and for reasons other than mistrust. The Wehrmacht wouldn't have handed a top panzer engineer a Schmeisser and sent him out against the Ivans. He was more useful making better panzers, and no corporal plucked from the ranks could replace him at that. Here, Hasso might be able to stand in for a Bucovinan horseman, but no native could stand in for him.

No Lenello wizard could stand in for him, either. I'm unique, he thought. If he'd known he would be so alone after he sat down on the Omphalos… he would have damn well done it anyway. Whatever his troubles were in this new world, they beat the hell out of getting shot in Berlin or enduring the Red Army's not so tender mercies. Whenever he felt bad about the way things were going, he needed to remember that. And he needed to remember that the difference between bad and worse was a lot bigger than the difference between good and better.