After the downfall

XVII

Scanno seemed to be an important fellow in Falticeni. The Bucovinans respected him even if his own folk didn't. When he told Lord Zgomot that Hasso might play along, Zgomot summoned the Wehrmacht officer in nothing flat.

Hasso bowed to the dark little man. From some things the natives had said, a lot of Lenelli, even renegades, had trouble bringing themselves to do that. Hasso didn't — why should he? Hitler was a dark little man, too, even if he did have blue eyes. And plenty of Germans these days were bowing down before Stalin, who by all accounts was even smaller and darker than Zgomot.

Among the Lord of Bucovin's courtiers stood Scanno and Drepteaza and Rautat. They all looked expectant. Scanno also looked almost indecently pleased with himself. He was a rogue — no doubt about it. But he likely did Bucovin more good than half a dozen more staid fellows would have.

Zgomot came straight to the point, asking in Lenello, "So you will show us what you know?"

"I try to show you some of it, yes, Lord." Hasso picked his words with care. He wasn't sure he could make gunpowder. Even if he could, he wasn't sure it would work in this world. And even if it did, he was a long way from sure he wanted it to work for the Bucovinans.

"If you do what we hope you can do, you will not lack for anything we can give you," Zgomot said. "If things turn out otherwise… If things turn out otherwise, we will treat you the way you deserve. Do you understand me?"

"I do, Lord," Hasso answered. If he performed, he would get anything he wanted — except Velona. If he didn't, he would get the chopper. That seemed fair enough… to someone whose neck wasn't on the line. Hasso had to fight the impulse to rub at his nape.

Zgomot's eyes might be dark and pouchy, but they were also uncommonly shrewd. "I understand that you do not love us, Hasso Pemsel. This is not a bargain about love. We have treated you well when we did not need to. We hope you will repay us for our kindness."

"I hope you do, too, Lord." Hasso had to fight even harder to keep that hand away from the back of his neck.

He hoped this would be it, and he could see if he could get his hands on saltpeter and charcoal and sulfur. If he couldn't, he was, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed. But the Lord of Bucovin wasn't quite done with him yet. "The holy priestess" — he pointed toward Drepteaza with his chin — "tells me you have somewhat of the wizards' blood in you."

Hasso nodded to Zgomot. "So it would seem, Lord, though I am not trained in magic."

"I will give you a piece of advice some Lenelli" — Zgomot didn't say some other Lenelli, which was a kindness of sorts — "would have done well to heed. We have no magic. You know that. But if you use it against us here in Falticeni, it will do you less good than you think. Do you hear me?"

"Some Lenelli tell me the same thing, Lord," Hasso answered. Even Velona's goddess-given powers had weakened, though they hadn't failed, as she neared the capital of Bucovin. She didn't know why but she knew it was so.

"The Lenelli don't like it when we have a wizard in our midst. They think he makes us more dangerous to them," Zgomot said. "But we don't always like it, either, because a wizard in our midst is dangerous to us. So far, though, no Lenello wizard has managed to hold on to Bucovin longer than a month or so. Even wizards, we find, can't watch everyone all the time."

He was small and swarthy and dumpy. He was also clever and cynical, and probably made a damn good king. If he was considerate enough to warn Hasso, the German decided he ought to take that as a compliment. Bowing, he said, "I understand, Lord. I never want to be a king — or even a lord — myself."

"Few men do — at the beginning. They find the ambition grows on them after a while, though." Zgomot had a formidable deadpan. Hasso wouldn't have cared to play cards against him. He went on, "It's sad, but most of those men don't come to a good end. You wouldn't want to see that happen to yourself, would you?"

"Now that you mention it, no." Hasso tried to match dry for dry.

He must have succeeded, because one corner of Zgomot's mouth twitched upward before the Lord of Bucovin could pull his face straight again. "All right," the native said. "Do what you can do, and we will see what it is." With that less than ringing endorsement, he dismissed Hasso from his presence.

Charcoal was easy. Sulfur was manageable, anyhow. Hasso didn't know the Lenello name for it, but he described it well enough to let Drepteaza recognize it. "We use it in medicine, and we burn it to fumigate," she said. "It stinks."

"It sure does," Hasso agreed. "How do you say fumigate in Bucovinan?" They still used Lenello most of the time. He was more fluent in it, and he needed to be as precise as he could here. For that matter, he hadn't known how to say fumigate in Lenello till she told him, but context was clear there.

She told him. Literally, the word meant something like burn-to-stink-out-pests. German could paste small words together to make big ones. Bucovinan did it all the time. It also pasted on particles that weren't words in themselves, but that changed statements to questions or commands; showed past, present, or future; showed complete or incomplete action; and did lots of other things German would have handled with cases and verb endings. The language struck Hasso as clumsy, but it got the job done. He preferred Lenello not only because he knew it better — it also worked more like German.

Even in Lenello, he had a devil of a time getting across the idea of saltpeter. In the old days, in Europe, it had been a medicine to keep young men from getting horny. It probably worked as badly as any other medicine from the old days, but that was what people used it for before they found out about gunpowder… and afterwards, too.

In Europe. Neither the Lenelli nor the Bucovinans seemed to know about that. And Hasso didn't know what the stuff looked like in the wild, so to speak. He got frustrated. So did Drepteaza. "If you don't know how it looks or where to find it, how do you expect me to?" she asked pointedly.

"Scheisse," Hasso muttered. Swearing in German still gave him far more relief than either Lenello or Bucovinan. But saying shit made him remember one of the few things he did know about saltpeter. "Dungheaps! You find it in dungheaps! You know the crystals you find at the bottom of them sometimes? That's saltpeter." He had to cast about several times before he got Drepteaza to understand crystals, too.

When she did, though, she nodded. "All right. Now, at least, I know what you're talking about. I don't know how to say it in Lenello. In my language, it's — " The Bucovinan word meant shitflowers.

Hasso grinned and nodded. "I remember that one — I promise," he said. "Do you have any of it?"

"I don't think so," she answered. "It isn't good for anything." She paused. "Not for anything we know, anyway."

"Can you get me some?" he asked.

"I suppose so. Some temple servant will think I've gone mad when I tell him to fork up a dunghill, but I suppose so. How much do you need?"

If he remembered right, black powder was three-quarters saltpeter, a tenth sulfur, and the rest charcoal. If he didn't remember right, or somewhere close to right, he was dead meat. "If this works, as much as I can get. To show it works… Say, this much." He put both fists close together.

"You'll have it." Drepteaza looked bemused — and amused, too. "Who would have thought anybody wanted shitflowers? What else will you need?"

"A good balance, to weigh things on. And grinders — stone or wood, not metal."

"Why not metal?"

"If I strike a spark… Well, I don't want to strike a spark." If he was going into the gunpowder business in a big way, he wouldn't be able to do it all himself. He would have to make sure the natives didn't do anything stupid or careless, or they'd go sky-high. Even in modern Europe, munitions plants blew up every once in a while. But he'd finally found one good thing about the absence of tobacco, anyhow. Nobody'd drop a smoldering cigar butt into a powder barrel.

Then he had a really scary thought. Could a Lenello wizard touch off gunpowder from a distance? Would he have to figure out a spell to keep that from happening? If he did, if he could, would he be able to take the spell off again to use the powder on the battlefield?

His head started to hurt. This was all a hell of a lot more complicated than it would have been in Germany in, say, 1250.

What he was thinking must have shown on his face. "Is something wrong?" Drepteaza asked.

"I hope not," Hasso answered. For a while, Lenello wizards wouldn't be able to figure out what he was doing. He hadn't gone into any great detail about gunpowder back in Bottero's kingdom. One of the people he had talked with was Orosei, and the master-at-arms was too dead to give much away now.

"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.

"A pot full of this could smash real people and real wagons the same way, yes?" Lord Zgomot asked.

"Yes, Lord. That's the idea," Hasso said. That was one of the ideas, anyway. The Bucovinans had catapults — they'd borrowed the idea from the Lenelli. Catapults could fling pots full of gunpowder at charging Lenello knights. The big blonds wouldn't like that. Neither would their horses, or their wizards' unicorns.

Wizards… Wizards went on worrying Hasso. What could they do to gunpowder? How soon would they figure it out?

And how soon would he have to go into the cannon-founding business? Cannon could easily outrange catapults. But he didn't know how to make them. Oh, he had an idea. You needed a hollow tube with a touch-hole at the end opposite the muzzle. But how thick did it have to be? If it blew up instead of sending a cannonball at the enemy, he wouldn't make himself popular in Bucovin. What kind of carriage should it have? Sure, one with wheels. That covered a lot of ground, though, ground he knew nothing about. One firecracker was a tiny start, no more.

No, this wouldn't be easy. Lord Zgomot wanted weapons to sweep away the Lenelli. Who could blame him? Hasso couldn't give him those weapons with a snap of the fingers. It wasn't that easy. And who'll blame me because I can't?

He knew the answer to that. Everybody.

Hasso didn't trust the Bucovinans to make gunpowder, not yet. They didn't know enough to be careful. After they watched him for a while, they probably would — after they watched him and after they saw some explosions. You had to respect the stuff or you had no business working with it.

At Drepteaza's suggestion, Rautat started learning the craft from him. The veteran underofficer had seen what firearms could do. If he didn't respect gunpowder, what Bucovinan would?

Hasso needed a while to realize that question had two possible answers. The one he wanted was that the Bucovinans would do fine after they got the hang of things. But the other one was also there. Maybe they wouldn't get the hang of it at all. Maybe they were too primitive. The Lenelli were somewhere close to the level where Europeans had been when they started making guns. The Bucovinans…

The Bucovinans were trying to pull themselves up to that level by their own bootstraps. How far below it had their several-times-great-grandparents been when the Lenelli first landed on these shores? A thousand years below? Two thousand years? Something like that. They'd started working iron, and they'd had kingdoms of sorts. The Lenelli had smashed a lot of them to confetti.

Bucovin survived. Because it lay farther east, it had had more time to absorb what the Lenelli brought with them before they actually bumped up against its borders. And, for whatever reason, magic didn't work so well near Falticeni. Hasso scratched his head. He wondered why that was so.

But he had more urgent things to worry about. "This isn't just like the thunder weapon you had before," Rautat remarked.

"It sure isn't," Hasso agreed. With a couple of dozen Schmeissers and enough ammo, he could have gone through all the Lenello kingdoms and Bucovin without breaking a sweat. But he didn't have them, so no point getting wistful about it.

"I know you say you can't make anything like that," Rautat said. Hasso nodded. The Bucovinan went on, "Well, how close can you come?"

"Not very." With a lot of work, Hasso figured he could eventually make a smoothbore matchlock musket. That wouldn't happen soon. It also wouldn't be that much more deadly than a bow and arrow, though it would be a lot easier to learn.

"Too bad," the underofficer said, and then, "You'd better not be holding out on us."

"I'm not, curse it!" Hasso said. "Why would I show you this much and not the rest, if I could do the rest? It makes no sense."

Rautat fingered the graying tendrils of his beard. "I guess so," he said, but he didn't sound a hundred percent convinced.

Wonderful. Just what I need, Hasso thought. Even the guys who work closest with me don't trust me. But he'd had that unhappy thought before. Nobody trusted someone who changed sides. You got what you could from a turncoat, but trust him? He'd already thrown away one loyalty. Why would he worry about another?

And Hasso knew he would go back to Bottero's kingdom in a flash if he got the chance. The Bucovinans had to know it, too, because they made sure he never got a chance. They didn't go into the garderobe with him when he needed to take a leak — not usually, anyhow — but that was about the only time he wasn't watched except when he was alone in his room. Lord Zgomot didn't get watched over the way Hasso did.

Well, why should he? Zgomot had no reason to light out for the tall timber. Hasso damn well did.

Would Velona take him back? He could hope so, anyhow. And even if she decided he was a racial traitor, Bottero would still think he was useful, wouldn't he? Sure he would.

Hasso found himself grinding his teeth, which wasn't the smartest thing he could do in a country where the dentists had never heard of laughing gas. Yeah, Bottero would think he was useful. But the Lenello king wouldn't fully trust him anymore, either. He'd worked for Bucovin, for the contemptible Grenye.

He was screwed any way you looked at it.

A couple of evenings later, he told Leneshul not to bother coming back any more. "All right," she said, and left with no more ceremony than that. She'd given him what he wanted, but she hadn't wanted anything from him. To her, he was just a job. Now she could go do something else.

The next morning, Drepteaza said, "Shall I find another woman for you?"

"In a while, maybe. Not right now," Hasso answered.

She frowned. "Even if you get no more bad dreams, it's not healthy for a man to go without a woman too long. You'll get grumpy and grouchy."

"If I have a woman I don't care about, it's not much better than no woman at all," Hasso said.

"I'm sorry Leneshul didn't please you as much as I hoped she would," Drepteaza said. "But I don't know what to do about that."

"You could — " Hasso broke off.

"What?"

"Nothing. It's nothing." Hasso buried his nose in a mug of beer. Me and my goddamn big mouth, he thought.

"What is it?" Drepteaza persisted. "If it is anything reasonable, we will do it for you. You do seem to be helping us. We pay our debts."

Reasonable? That was funny, or would have been if only he were laughing. He took another pull at the beer. Even in wartime Germany, it would have been pretty bad. By local standards, it was pretty good. If only I knew something about brewing. If only I knew something about anything. "Nothing," Hasso said again.

Drepteaza looked severe. "You say it is nothing. Then you will get angry because we can't guess what it is and deliver it to you without being asked. We know how these things go — we've seen them before."

She wasn't going to leave him alone. He could see that coming like a rash — or like a salvo of Katyusha rockets from a Stalin Organ. Well, maybe the truth would shut her up. She couldn't get too mad — he hoped — not when she'd asked for it. "If I wanted any woman in my bed, it would be you." Any Bucovinan woman. Yes, he had to make the reservation even after Velona tried to kill him. If that didn't say he had it bad, what would?

He didn't shock the priestess. To his immense relief, he saw that right away. He saw no answering spark flash, though. Damn! "It is a compliment. I ought to thank you for it. I do thank you for it," she said slowly.

"But." Hasso packed a world — two worlds — of bitterness into one word.

"Yes. But." Drepteaza did him the courtesy of not misunderstanding, and of not beating around the bush the way he had. "I am very sorry, Hasso Pemsel, but when I look at you I see a Lenello. I don't know what else to say. I don't think anything else needs saying — do you?"

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?"

"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."