Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

Rautat ran into him in the hallway, surely not by accident. "Well?" the underofficer asked. "Did you talk the lord out of using gunpowder?"

"Yes, I do that. Did that," Hasso answered. His Lenello wouldn't get any better in Falticeni. Pretty soon he'd have a Bucovinan accent to go with the German accent he'd never be able to help. Then he'd sound really funny to somebody from Drammen.

"Well, well!" Rautat didn't even try to hide his surprise. "You don't change Zgomot's mind every day." He laughed at himself. "I never change his mind. If not for you, he wouldn't know who the demon I am. Life would be easier that way, too."

"Life is never easy. It has teeth." Hasso pointed to the dragon's fang that had been here since before the Lenelli crossed the ocean and found this new land for themselves.

Rautat eyed the formidable fang. "Most of the time, I hope, not such sharp ones."

Hasso wouldn't have wanted anything with teeth like that crunching down on him, either. "Dragons live in the north?" he asked, pointing in that direction.

"Yes, of course. Everybody knows that." Rautat caught himself. "Everybody but you, I guess. No dragons in the place you come from?"

"Only mothers-in-law," Hasso answered.

It wasn't much of a joke — he didn't think so, anyhow. Rautat blushed like a scandalized schoolgirl, though, and giggled like one, too. "We… don't usually talk about those people," he said. "You startled me when you did. Like dragons? Oh, my!" He started giggling again.

He not only didn't like to talk about mothers-in-law, he wouldn't even name them. Hasso wondered how big a taboo he'd just violated. Not a small one, not by Rautat's reaction.

"How often do dragons come down here?" Hasso asked. Maybe he could find out more about the mother-in-law business from Drepteaza. It might give him something to talk about with her that wasn't too dangerously intimate, anyhow. "Can you make them go one way or another?" he persisted. Vague thoughts of siccing a dragon on the Lenelli flitted through his mind.

"Dragons come when they want to come. You can't do anything about it. We were lucky to kill even one," Rautat said. "We thought it was a miracle. We thought we were wonderful. Then the big blonds came out of the west, and we found out we weren't so wonderful as we thought."

The way his eyes traveled Hasso's long frame said the German was still about ninety-eight percent Lenello to him, too — maybe ninety-nine percent. Since he felt much more Lenello than Grenye here himself, and since those were the only choices he had in this world, how could he blame Rautat — or Drepteaza — for seeing him that way?

Lord Zgomot gave whatever orders he gave. Hasso stayed in the palace in Falticeni. Eventually, he supposed, after everyone else did, he would find out what happened. In the meantime, he could keep on fiddling on with gunpowder, getting ready for the real war he and Zgomot and the rest of Bucovin knew was coming.

He wondered how big a fool he was. Should he have promised the Lord of Bucovin the sun and moon and little stars, gone off toward the western border, and tried to get back to the Lenelli, back to Bottero's kingdom? Magic worked better in the west. He might have put one over on the natives and slipped away without their being the wiser.

Yes? And then what? he asked himself. Would Bottero welcome him back with open arms after he'd given Bucovin the secret of gunpowder? He hadn't even given that to the Lenelli — when was there time? Besides, after rescuing Velona he wasn't in such desperate need of another trick to keep himself alive among them.

And they were more willing to take him at face value. Unhappily, he nodded to himself. That was the phrase, all right. The Lenelli wanted to accept him, because he looked like them. The Grenye didn't, because to them he was guilty of being a Lenello till proved innocent — and probably after that, too.

His thoughts drifted back to the escape he hadn't made, hadn't even tried. What about Velona? Would she welcome him back with open arms? Even more to the point, would she welcome him back with open legs? Not by what he'd seen in his dreams. He hadn't just betrayed the Lenelli, not to the goddess on earth. He'd betrayed her personally when he lay down with Leneshul. That was how she saw it, anyway. She was good at an awful lot of things. Was she good at forgiving? Hasso didn't think so.

"God damn it to hell," he muttered, there in the loneliness of his room. "I am fucked. I am really fucked."

When he came out into the wider loneliness of the palace, he felt the same way. How could he help it? He had trouble getting excited about working on the gunpowder. He stayed careful and attentive with that, because he didn't want to blow himself up. With less urgent items like language lessons, he had trouble meeting even a lesser standard.

Drepteaza noticed right away. "Shall I find you another tutor?" she asked. "Are you so angry that I don't want to go to bed with you that you don't want anything else to do with me anymore? I can understand how you might be. It seems petty to me, but maybe it doesn't to you."

"No. It is not you." To emphasize that, Hasso spoke in Bucovinan as best he could. "It is — everything." His wave took in not only the room, not only the palace, not only Falticeni or Bucovin, but the whole world. "I do not belong here. I never belong here. Never."

"I think you are wrong. I think you must be wrong," the priestess said seriously. "You told me how you came here, how you sat on the stone in your world and then suddenly you found yourself in this one."

"Yes? And so?" Hasso said. The first thing I did when I got here was shoot myself some Grenye. The next thing I did was screw the Lenello goddess on earth. Once upon a time, he'd thought that meant something important. Now? Now he had to do some new thinking.

But Drepteaza insisted, "It must mean something, Hasso Pemsel. Things don't just happen. They happen for a reason."

"What about the Lenelli?" Hasso asked.

She winced, but she had the courage of her convictions. "Even the Lenelli came here for a reason," she said. Then her mouth quirked in one of her wry grins. "To rob, to kill, to rape, to enslave…" But she shook her head. "That is not what I mean. They are part of the larger purpose, too."

"Whose purpose?" Hasso asked. "The purpose of your gods? The purpose of the Lenello goddess?" He didn't bother naming the God he'd left behind in the ruins of Berlin. Once upon a time, he'd been a believing Christian. How you could go on being a believing Christian after five and a half years of war… Well, he hadn't, so what point worrying about that? And they already had plenty of deities running around loose here. What did they need with another one imported by the only man who'd once believed in Him?

"I don't know," Drepteaza answered with another of those disarming grins. "The goddess is real — that is plain. We believe Lavtrig and our other gods are real, too, though they are quieter in the way they poke the world with their fingers. Whether something larger lies behind all that — well, who can say? But the wicked do not triumph forever. Nothing can make me believe that."

Then why did the Reds beat Germany? Hasso wondered. Why wouldn't the USA and England see that Stalin was more dangerous than Hitler ever could be?

Maybe God was out having a few drinks with the Lenello goddess and the Bucovinan gods. That made as much, or as little, sense to Hasso as anything else. He spread his hands. "I have no answers, priestess."

"You would scare me if you said you did," Drepteaza said. "You would scare me worse if you made me believe you." She eyed him. "More than most people, you would make me wonder if you did say something like that."

"Me? All I'm trying to do here is stay alive," Hasso said.