Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

"Sorry." Hasso was sorry about how he felt — that was for sure.

She startled him with a smile. "It happens," she said. "You're a human being, too."

That was how Hasso turned the word into German in his mind, anyhow. The literal meaning of the Bucovinan was somebody who speaks our language. The ancient Greeks had called foreigners barbaroi — people who made bar-bar noises instead of words that meant something. Nemtsi, the Russian name for Germans, meant tongue-tied ones or mutes. Considering how little Bucovinan Hasso actually spoke, Drepteaza either stretched a point or paid him a considerable compliment.

He stood up. He seldom cared to do that around her; it reminded her how different from her folk he was. But right now that was exactly the point. Bowing, he said, "Not a cursed Lenello, eh?"

She bit her lip. Did she turn red? She was too dark and the lighting too gloomy to let Hasso be sure. "You can't help the way you look, Hasso Pemsel," she said. "And I can't help looking at you and seeing… what you look like."

Rumors ran through the Wehrmacht that Hitler didn't trust Field Marshal Manstein because he thought the officer had Jewish blood. Manstein's impressive sickle of a nose no doubt had a lot to do with those rumors. What was this but more of the same?

Hasso sighed. "You see what you want to see, whether it is there or not." To make matters worse, he had to say that in Lenello; it was too complicated to let him turn it into Bucovinan.

"Maybe I do. Probably I do, in fact," Drepteaza said, also in Lenello. "And what do King Bottero and his men see when they look at us? What does Velona see when she looks at us?" Did her voice take on a certain edge when she named the goddess on earth? Hasso thought so.

Before he answered, he sat down again. Looming over her if he wasn't making a point was just plain rude. Besides, his head hurt less when he got off his feet. "You know what they think," he said uncomfortably. And he'd thought the same thing till he came to Falticeni as a captive. How could he help it?

"Oh, yes. I know." Drepteaza's nod was a ripple atop an ocean of hard-restrained bitterness. "I know too well. We are small and swart and ugly. And the Lenelli can work magic and we can't. To the Lenelli, that turns us into something not much more than beasts. But only a handful of them are wizards. The rest are as mindblind as we are. Does that turn them into beasts, too?"

Scanno had pointed out the same thing. When Hasso stayed in Drammen, he'd never once asked about it. He wondered why not. King Bottero could no more cast a spell than Drepteaza. But Bottero, wizard or not, was tall and fair and blue-eyed. To the Lenelli, that put him several steps up on the natives.

Didn't German propaganda go on and on about Jewish mouths and noses? Didn't the Aryans of the Reich look down their straight noses at Italians because they were small and dark and excitable? Negroes? The less said about Negroes, the better. The Fuhrer hadn't wanted to shake that colored sprinter and jumper's hand even after he won all those gold medals at the Berlin Olympics.

And, coming back to this world, the Bucovinan priestess was dead right. Most Lenelli were as mindblind as her own folk. That didn't turn them into Untermenschen in the eyes of their countrymen.

All that talk was… talk. The Lenelli didn't like the Grenye because they looked different, they talked different, and they were in the way. Those were all common enough reasons for two folk not to like each other: Germans and Frenchmen sprang to mind. But the mindblindness gave the Lenelli an extra excuse to use the natives any way they pleased.

It all seemed as plain as a punch in the jaw to Hasso, who looked at the way things were here from the outside. Suddenly, out of the blue, he wondered what a Lenello dropped into his world would think of the Reich's racial notions. Would they look as foolish to him as Bottero's ideas did to Hasso?

He was damned if he could see why not.

Hell, some of those policies looked foolish even to a lot of Germans. If they'd used all the people in the USSR who hated Communism and Stalin instead of jumping on them with both feet and driving them back into the Red fold, they could hardly have done worse on the Eastern Front. And there were times when soldiers didn't move because trains were busy hauling Jews around behind the lines. If you were going to deal with the Jews like that, wouldn't after the war have been a better time?

Why didn't I pay more attention to this while I was there? Hasso wondered. He hadn't seen any need to: that was why. Everybody set above him, everybody beside him, and everybody below him seemed to have pretty much the same ideas.

"My God! We threw the stupid war away, and we didn't even know it!"

"What?" Only when Drepteaza asked did he realize he'd spoken German.

"Nothing. Nothing I can do anything about now, anyway," Hasso answered sheepishly. "Something from back in the world I come from."

"Oh." Drepteaza sent him a shrewd look. "Something that has to do with a woman there?"

She might be shrewd, but that didn't make her right. He shook his head. "No, not with a woman. With my kingdom, and with its affairs." The Reich wasn't a kingdom, of course, but explaining what it was was beyond him in either Lenello or Bucovinan. It might have been beyond him in German, too.

Drepteaza didn't press him, which was something of a relief. She just said, "I hope you'll remember you're here now."

He nodded. "I'm not likely to forget it," he said.

"Ha!" Scanno called when Hasso came down to the soldiers' buttery a couple of days later. The renegade set down his spoon — he was eating tripe soup that morning. He went on, "They do let you out every now and again."

"Yes, every now and again." Hasso didn't feel like talking to him — and then, all of a sudden, he did. "Can I ask you a question?"

Scanno spooned up another mouthful of soup. Then he said, "You can always ask. If I don't like it, maybe I'll kick you into the middle of next week."

"You can always try," Hasso said politely — too politely. He wasn't afraid of Scanno, not even a little bit. The renegade scowled at him: Scanno was as arrogant and full of himself as any other Lenello. Hasso didn't care. He asked, "When Aderno tries to put a spell on you in Drammen, how do you know he can't?"

"Oh. That!" Scanno laughed. "On account of I've had other wizards try to ensorcel me, and not a one of 'em could do it. Not since I was a kid, matter of fact."

"Really?" Hasso said.

"Sure. Why the demon would I waste my time lying to you?" Scanno returned to his tripe soup, which seemed more interesting to him than Hasso was. "Makes your insides hurt not quite so bad, anyway," he remarked.

"Yes, I know," Hasso said, at which the renegade laughed. "Have you got any idea why this is so?" Hasso persisted.

Scanno started to shake his head, then thought better of it. Hung over, Hasso had made that same quick choice more than once. Just talking hurt less, and Scanno did: "Never even worried about it. It's something about me, that's all, like I'll spend the night farting if I eat leeks for supper."

"Right," Hasso said — sometimes you could find out more about somebody than you really wanted to know. He tried a different angle: "Do you remember when this starts? Not when you are a child?"

"No, after that, like I told you." Scanno frowned, trying to remember. "If you're smart, you don't want wizards trying to mess with you," he observed. Hasso didn't say anything. He'd already seen that Scanno wasn't smart that way. And, sure as hell, the renegade continued, "Must've been about fifteen years ago. I called some high and mighty wizard a cocksucking son of a whore, and he told me he'd turn me into a pig for that. And the bastard tried, and he couldn't."