After the downfall

XXV

Except for the stinks, Hasso was glad to get back to Falticeni. And Lord Zgomot seemed as glad to have him back as he was ever glad about anything — which is to say, not very. The Lord of Bucovin said, "So the gunpowder shells work the way you want them to, do they?"

"Close enough, Lord," Hasso answered.

Zgomot plucked a white hair from his beard. He twirled it between his fingers and let it fall. "Close enough is as much as you can expect in life most of the time, isn't it?"

"I don't argue with that, Lord," the Wehrmacht officer said.

"You'd better not," Zgomot told him. "You're old enough to know. So tell me, Hasso Pemsel — are you happy now that Drepteaza's finally sleeping with you?"

"Close enough, Lord," Hasso repeated, deadpan.

The Lord of Zgomot grunted. "Well, I'll forgive that from you — you had the Lenello goddess on earth in your bed for a while. That must have been something. Wearing, I'd guess, but something all the same. But tell me this: is Drepteaza happy, now that she's finally sleeping with you?"

She'd better be, or I'll make you sorry, his tone warned. Drepteaza mattered to him. Carefully, Hasso answered, "I think she is also close enough. If you don't believe me, you can ask her."

"Oh, I did," Zgomot said. "I summoned her before I called you. I think you are right, pretty much. I did want to find out how big a braggart you are, now that you finally got something you wanted for a long time."

"And?" Hasso said.

"And no doubt about it — you are no Lenello. If you were, I would have heard about every thrust, every gasp, every wiggle." Zgomot raised an eyebrow. "You lived among the blonds. You know they are vain that way."

From what Hasso had seen, the Bucovinans were blunter about screwing than the Lenelli. Lord Zgomot had a point, though: the Lenelli did invest more vanity in it. Since Hasso didn't much want to talk about it, he changed the subject, "Are the men back with the dragon bones?"

"No," the Lord of Bucovin replied, which answered what Hasso'd asked but left him wanting more.

More involved another question: "Is Bottero moving yet?"

"Also no, for which I thank Lavtrig and the other gods," Zgomot said.

"Yes," Hasso said, though he believed in none of the Bucovinan gods. He wouldn't have believed in the Lenello goddess, either, if he hadn't been compelled to believe there was something there. "The border isn't closed, then."

"No, it is not," Zgomot agreed. Hasso nodded to himself. Since he'd gone over to the other side, the Lenelli were liable to have decided all his security worries and precautions were nothing but a load of crap. He hoped they did. That would make defending against them a hell of a lot easier. With a sigh, Zgomot went on, "But when Bottero does move, we are going to have to get through another invasion. Another year's crops ruined in the west. Another year of burning and murder and rape."

"That is what war is," Hasso said. "Only one thing worse than to go through it."

"Oh?" The Lord of Bucovin raised an eyebrow. "I would not have thought anything was worse. I do not think anything is worse."

"One thing is," Hasso insisted. "To go through a war and lose — that is worse. That is what happens — happened — to my land, in my world. That is why I am here." To try so much, to suffer so much, to go through so much death and devastation, to do that twice in less than half a lifetime and have nothing at all to show for it… was the lot of Germany. How might things have turned out worse? He couldn't begin to imagine.

"We managed not to lose last year," Zgomot said. "Then, Bottero started late in the campaigning season. He will not make the same mistake twice — say what you will about the Lenelli, but they do not make the same mistake twice in a row. That is my people's failing, I fear. Our imaginations spin more slowly than theirs."

"Not with you ruling, Lord." Hasso wasn't throwing out flattery to butter Zgomot up. The Lord of Bucovin was doing as well as he could against long odds.

"I think Bottero made a bigger mistake last year, too," he said now. Hasso made a questioning noise. Zgomot eyed him. "He let me get my hands on you. He will regret that to his dying day — and may it come soon."

"You give me too much credit," Hasso said.

"I'd better not," Lord Zgomot replied.

After Hasso and Velona became lovers, they moved in together and never separated till he got left for dead on the battlefield and she had to withdraw. Drepteaza didn't take up residence with him in Zgomot's castle, no matter how much he wished she would have. She moved more slowly than Velona in almost every way.

But she didn't stay away from his chamber, either. Sometimes he could talk her into coming by on a particular night. Sometimes she would knock on her own. Most of the time, she would make love with him. Once in a while, she only wanted to talk. He quickly decided getting annoyed about that was a bad idea.

One evening, when she was leaving after talking with him for a couple of hours, he gave her a crooked smile and asked, "Do I pass the test?"

Even in the lamplight, even with her olive skin, he could see her turn red. It took him by surprise; he hadn't meant to embarrass her. But she answered as frankly as usual: "As a matter of fact, you do. A woman wants to think a man wants her for something more than just this." She touched herself between the legs for a moment. "And I think you do. And I think that is good."

"I can talk with you better than with anyone else — except maybe Rautat." Hasso barked laughter. "And that is not the same."

"No, it isn't," Drepteaza agreed. "Not that Rautat is stupid — I've seen he's not. But there are times when he would rather not think."

"Yes!" Hasso nodded vigorously. Rautat made a good underofficer: he liked routine. He would have made a wonderful friend for another underofficer whose mind worked the same way. Hell, he was friends with other sergeants like that. Hasso's mind ranged further. In this world, it damn well had to. "You can go places with me where he doesn't want to — and not just in bed."

"You may end up changing us more than the Lenelli have," Drepteaza said. "For better? For worse? How can we know ahead of time? But you change us."

He thought again about the printing press. One of these days. When he had time. If he ever did. If the Bucovinans ever started printing books, that would change them even more than gunpowder did. But that lay in the future, a future that might never be born. "If I don't, the Lenelli do," he said.

"We know it," Drepteaza answered. "If you change us, maybe we stay ourselves, too. If the Lenelli change us, we lose ourselves forever. There used to be lots of little kingdoms in the western part of the land. They're gone now. Even the Grenye who still live in them don't know much about how they used to be. That could happen to us, too."

Hasso had seen those Grenye peasants. They had nothing but work and drink. Some of them had nothing but drink. As far as the Lenelli were concerned, that was fine.

The Germans would have run the Ukraine and Russia the same way if they'd won. Hasso hadn't thought much about that while he was fighting the Ivans. Now he did. His country had aimed to destroy another one — not just to beat it, but to destroy it. No wonder the Russians fought back so ferociously.

And what did Germany end up doing? Destroying itself instead. So much for all the glorious triumphs of the Reich.

"What were you thinking?" Drepteaza asked. "For a moment there, you looked over the mountains."

To the Bucovinans, that meant a long way off. Most of the time, it made an effective figure of speech. Not here. Not now. "I was thinking about my old land," Hasso answered. "Farther away than over the mountains."

"What about it?"

"I begin to understand why we lost our war. We wanted to treat our enemies the way the Lenelli treat Grenye," Hasso said. "But the Lenelli know more tricks than the Grenye. We didn't know more tricks — not enough more."

"Will you be angry if I say it does not sound as though your land was on a good path?" Drepteaza asked.

Hasso shook his head. "No. It does not sound that way to me, either, not now. But in the middle of a war, who worries about such things? You have enemies. You fight them. You try to beat them. You try to keep them from beating you. You don't think past that. To think past that is your, uh, king's job."

"If your king orders you to do something you know is wicked, should you do it?"

He frowned. "If you know it is wicked, no. But mostly, for a soldier, much simpler. You fight the other side's army. You try to beat it. What happens in the land you take — that's not your worry."

No. That wasn't the Wehrmacht's worry. That was up to the SS, to the Gestapo, to people like that. They didn't think Hitler could order them to do anything wicked. If he ordered it, it had to be all right.

"Your conscience troubles you." Drepteaza didn't make it a question.

He could have denied it — by lying to her, and to himself. "Some," he said. "I did a lot of fighting, the last four years against our worst enemies. Maybe we were not always good. I know we weren't. Not them, either."

"Few people would choose war," Drepteaza said, and then qualified that by adding, "Few Bucovinans would, anyhow. I am not so sure about the Lenelli."

Hasso wasn't so sure about the Lenelli, either. They thought they had a goddess-given mission to civilize — that is, to conquer — the Grenye. The Germans had thought the same thing about their Slavic neighbors. They'd tried conquering them again and again… and now the Russian Slavs had turned things upside down. The Germans had usually had an edge, but not one big enough to make up for the numbers against them.

The British made it work in India and North America, the Spaniards farther south. So it could, if the gap between attackers and attacked was wide enough. Would it have been here? Hasso didn't know. All he knew was that he was doing his damnedest to throw a spanner into the works.

"Maybe," he said slowly, "maybe I owe somebody something."

When a Bucovinan messenger ran up to Lord Zgomot's palace, Hasso took no special notice. That happened all the time. He did notice when a messenger rode up to the palace. The natives didn't have that many horses. They saved the ones they did have for important business. And since he was waiting to hear about some important business…

A messenger — on foot — summoned him to Zgomot's throne room. "What is it about?" Hasso asked, his hopes rising.

"I don't know. The Lord of Bucovin didn't tell me," the palace flunky answered. "If you go, though, he will tell you."

So there, Hasso thought. He made himself nod and smile and not give the messenger the satisfaction of knowing he'd irked him. "I go, then," he said, and he did.

When he got to the throne room, he found Lord Zgomot in animated conversation with the man who'd come in on horseback. Zgomot in animated conversation with anybody was a prodigy; the native ruler wasn't long on personality. But the Lord of Bucovin looked up and actually smiled as Hasso approached.

"Good day, Hasso Pemsel," he said. "I owe that drunken Lenello a large reward. I am slow to spend my gold and silver without need, but I gladly do it here."

"We have dragon bones?" Hasso asked.

"We have dragon bones," Zgomot agreed. He gestured toward the messenger. "I learn that they are in our lands, and they passed by Bottero's men without suspicion. The Lenelli thought we might grind them up to manure our soil. We did not discourage them from thinking this."

He sounded pleased with himself — and well he might. He sounded very pleased with himself, in fact. "A nice touch, Lord," Hasso said. "Your idea?"

"As a matter of fact, yes," Zgomot answered. "Things you said about keeping the Lenelli from knowing what we are up to came to mind. A story like that will also let the blonds think we are stupid barbarians who could not get bones closer to home. They think we are stupid barbarians anyway, of course."

"Yes, they do." Hasso had, too, when he was in Drammen. Now he was glad to get the chance to speak of the folk he resembled as they. Compared to the Lenelli, the Bucovinans were on the barbarous side. But, as he'd seen, that didn't make them stupid. The Lenelli just knew some tricks of the trade that they didn't. Well, no, not just: the Lenelli could also work magic.

Lord Zgomot pursed his lips. "Wheels inside of wheels, eh?"

"Always," Hasso said. "When do bones get to Falticeni?"

"I do not know." The Lord of Bucovin turned to the messenger. "Yurgam?"

"Ten days or so," Yurgam answered. "Once they made it over the border, they got horses instead of donkeys, but they are still pulling a heavy wagon."

Hasso shrugged. "It has to do." He would have wanted the bones here sooner, but he couldn't turn a horse-drawn wagon into an Opel truck or, better yet, a captured American Studebaker. That wouldn't have been magic; it would have been a bigger miracle than the one that brought him here. He nodded to Zgomot. "We need saws to cut bone. We need drills to put holes in pieces. We need cord or thongs to hold them in place."

"What are the bones for, if not manuring?" Yurgam asked.

Before Hasso could speak, Zgomot did: "I do not want to tell you, not yet. The fewer people who know, the better. The more things we learn, it seems, the more secrets we need to keep."

Hasso beamed. Sure as hell, Zgomot was starting to see what security was all about. He might be a mindblind Grenye, but he was one damn sly mindblind Grenye. There'd almost been some security hiccups about gunpowder and dragon bones. If the Lord of Bucovin had anything to do with it, there would be no more. He learned from his mistakes.

That's more than Hitler ever did, Hasso thought.

And, if the dragon-bone amulets worked, how much would being mindblind matter in a few years? Oh, some. Magic would still be able to do things to the world, if not directly to people. Wizards would still be able to ride unicorns. Hasso grinned. He could ride one himself, as he'd proved. The Grenye still wouldn't be able to.

Yeah, magic would matter some. But it wouldn't mark enormous distinctions between one folk and another, the way it did now.

Equality. This is equality. Hasso hadn't had much use for it when he saw it in action — and in inaction — during the Weimar Republic. But he'd also seen that the Fuhrerprinzip had some flaws in practice. The Fuhrer led, the people followed — right over a goddamn cliff. Maybe making everybody as good as everybody else worked better.

He could hope so. In fact, he had to hope so. If the Lenelli had magic and the Grenye didn't, and if that magic stayed important, he feared the big blonds would win in the end no matter what he did.

Someone called his name through the echoing corridors of dreams: "Hasso! Hasso Pemsel!"

He tried to shape the ward spell again, this time in his sleep. He had some luck with that, anyhow: enough to let him wake up without waking up screaming. Once awake, he went to the door of his room and told one of the guards, "Ask Drepteaza to come here, please."

The winter before, a Bucovinan guardsman would have laughed in his face at the idea of bothering her in the middle of the night. This fellow nodded and said, "All right. If she chooses not to come, though, don't blame me."

"Fair enough," Hasso said. The guard set off down the corridor.

Drepteaza was yawning and rubbing her eyes when she came back with the soldier. "What is it?" she asked blurrily, around another yawn. "Something important, I expect." It had better be. She didn't say that — or need to.

"Maybe. I hope you are not angry at me." He led her into the room and shut the door behind them. "The Lenello wizard and the goddess are hunting me in dreams again."

"And so? What has that got to do with me?" No, Drepteaza wasn't awake yet, or thinking very fast. Then she remembered. The dim lamplight shadowing her face only made her smile look more crooked. "Oh. A woman will hold that away from you, for a night at least. A new way to tell me you care, eh?"

"Sorry," Hasso said. "Should I get someone like Leneshul? I don't much want her, but if you want me to use her for medicine and not bother you, I can do that."

Drepteaza started to laugh. "The really funny part is, I believe you when you say you don't much want her," she said. "What kind of fool am I, though, if I give you the chance to change your mind? I may not be at my best, but I'll try."

Hasso feared he wasn't at his best, either. Maybe they matched each other, because it turned out all right, or better than all right. "You are the best medicine," he said afterwards, stroking her cheek. "They should make you into syrup and put you in bottles."

She laughed again, on a startled note. "That's the most ridiculous sweet thing — or maybe the sweetest ridiculous thing — anyone ever told me."

"It's true," Hasso said.

"Ha!" Drepteaza replied, which wasn't a laugh at all. She yawned once more. "Try not to wiggle too much. I don't feel like going back to my room."

"You wiggle more than I do," Hasso said. From where the two of them ended up when they slept together, he thought that was true. He added, "Besides, tonight I don't wiggle at all," and mimed limp exhaustion.

"A likely story," Drepteaza said, but she closed her eyes and soon fell asleep. So did Hasso, and Aderno's wizardry didn't trouble him for the rest of the night.

The wagon full of dragon bones came into Falticeni the next morning. The driver had to fight his way through the narrow, winding, crowded streets to the palace. None of the locals knew what an important cargo he had. Thanks to the way the bone-hunters were chosen, the driver didn't fully understand that himself.

One look at some of the teeth and claws in the wagon told Hasso the bones were real. "Good," he said. "Now we go to work. We cut them up small, we make them into amulets."

"What are the amulets good for?" one of the Bucovinans asked.

Instead of answering straight out, Hasso came back with a question of his own: "Is King Bottero marching yet? Does anybody know?"

The wagon driver nodded. "He's marching, all right. He wasn't that far behind us when we left his realm. One of the border guards who passed us through said it was nice of us to manure our fields — the big blond pricks would get good crops out of them." The little swarthy man aimed an obscene gesture back toward the west. Then he noticed Hasso watching him. "Uh, no offense."

"It's all right. They are a bunch of big blond pricks," Hasso said.

"Then what does that make you?" Cheeky as a park sparrow, the Bucovinan grinned at him.

"Oh, I'm a big blond prick, too," Hasso answered easily. "But I'm a big blond prick with two differences."

"Yeah? What are they?" the driver asked, a split second in front of one of his pals.

"For one thing, I'm a foreign big blond prick, not a Lenello big blond prick. And I'm a big blond prick who's on your side."

When Lord Zgomot heard the invasion had begun, he started assembling his own army. Bucovin was a big, sprawling kingdom or lordship or whatever the hell the right name was. The natives sensibly laid up supplies here and there on the main routes around the realm so soldiers wouldn't starve as they came in to Falticeni. But, without the telegraph, without trains, without trucks, nothing happened as fast as Hasso wished it would.

He got a surprise of his own not long after the mobilization order went out. Into the tent city that was sprouting in front of Falticeni came perhaps a thousand men who marched with long pikes held straight up and down. They marched well, too — the pikes stayed vertical, and didn't dip and foul one another.

After seeing them come in, Hasso hurried back to Lord Zgomot. "They look good," he said. "Can they fight?"

"They have all fought before," the Lord of Bucovin answered. "They have never fought like this, but they have been drilling hard. They like being called Hedgehogs, by the way — that is what they named the regiment."

"Good for them," Hasso said. "If they don't keep Lenello knights off the catapults, no one does." That last was always possible, even if he would have preferred not to dwell on it. He went on, "How long are they working?"

"I pulled them together before you went off to my estate to try the catapults and the gunpowder shells," Zgomot answered. "When you described them, I thought, This is something we really can do. It does not take anything we did not already have — it is only a new way to use tools we already knew about."

"You did it without me, too." Hasso didn't know whether to be proud or worried. If the natives decided they could get along without him, would they knock him over the head and do just that?

"You were busy with other things. I thought we could manage this ourselves, and I turned out to be right," Zgomot said. "I hope they stay steady when the fighting starts, that is all."

"So do I," Hasso said. "I am going to be with the catapults. The Hedgehogs keep — will keep — the big blond pricks off my neck."

"That would be good," Lord Zgomot said, his voice dry. "You should watch them drill, to make sure we did not forget anything."

"I do that," Hasso promised.

He kept the promise, too — as he said, it was his own personal, private neck on the line. The picked regiment of Bucovinan foot soldiers knew he'd had the idea for their formation. That didn't seem to bother them; they were used to having new ideas come from foreigners. The Japanese would have been like that in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Now they could stand up to anybody in the world.

How long would it be before the Bucovinans could stand up to anybody in this world? Win this fight first, or you won t get the chance, Hasso thought. He fingered the dragon's-fang amulet he wore under his tunic. Aderno and Velona hadn't paid any sorcerous calls on him since he donned it. Maybe that meant they couldn't. He sure hoped so. But maybe it just meant they hadn't tried the past few days.

Win this fight first. That was always the imperative. And when he watched the Hedgehogs go through their evolutions, he began to think the Bucovinans could. They marched very well. They formed ten rows and lowered their pikes into a bristling wall of points. If he were a horse, he wouldn't have wanted to try to charge through them. You could hurt yourself that way.

He said as much to the officer in charge of them. The native — his name was Meshterul — nodded. "We will hold. The gods-cursed Lenelli will never get through us," he vowed.

That was an important consideration. Whether the Bucovinans knew it or not, it wasn't the only consideration. "All right. They can't get through you," Hasso said. "Can they get around you?"

Meshterul frowned. "Around?" No, he didn't get it.

"Around, yes." Hasso nodded. "Who is on your flanks? If the Lenelli get to the catapults through those people, we are still screwed."

"Ah." Meshterul nodded. He sketched a salute. "You're right. I was just thinking about the Hedgehogs. But the real point is keeping the big blond pricks off the catapults, isn't it?"

"Ja" Hasso said. Drepteaza and Rautat and maybe even Lord Zgomot might know what that meant, but Meshterul only gave him a blank look. Hasso kept to Bucovinan after that: "Yes. You're right — that is the point. The Hedgehogs may be very important later on. If the whole line of foot soldiers carries long pikes, how do the Lenelli break through at all?"

Meshterul's eyes sparkled. "That'll be the day, by Lavtrig!"

"Yes," Hasso said again, once more in Bucovinan. "But that day is not here yet." You've got the Hedgehogs, and you've got a bunch of odds and sods armed with this and that, the kind of troops the Lenelli have been licking ever since they crossed the Western Ocean.

"We'll need riders on our flanks, then," the Bucovinan officer said.

Hasso found himself nodding. Bucovinan knights mostly couldn't match their Lenello counterparts. They were better than ordinary Bucovinan infantry, though. After some thought of his own, the Wehrmacht officer said, "And we put mines in front of and around the catapults, too, if we fight in a position that gives us time to do it."

"I haven't seen those in action. Everybody tells me they're strong magic, though," Meshterul said.

"Not magic at all," Hasso said… one more time. Meshterul stayed polite, but plainly didn't believe him. If something went boom! and blew Lenelli to hell and gone, it had to be magic, didn't it? People in this world sure as hell thought so. Even though Hasso knew better, he also knew he had to remember to take care of a couple of things: "Some of the mines will be fakes, bluffs — just turned earth with a fuse sticking out."

"What good does that do?" Meshterul asked.

"It saves gunpowder. It keeps the Lenelli guessing. And we can make fake mines faster than real ones. If the Lenelli don't know they're fakes, they might as well be real," Hasso answered.

The Bucovinan captain started to laugh. "I'm glad you're on our side, dip me in shit and fry me for a pork chop if I'm not."

Hasso wasn't nearly so sure he was glad to be on the Bucovinans' side. But he wasn't sure he wasn't glad, either, which marked a change in the way he looked at this world. And it wasn't just because he was sleeping with Drepteaza; he was sure of that. He'd lived here long enough now and seen enough to have gained a perspective different from the one he had when he first got here… and different from the one he brought from his own world. Ubermenschen? Untermenschen? No, and no. People were… people, dammit.

So here he was, fighting for the little swarthy bastards, getting ready to go to war against the big blond pricks. He started to laugh, which made Meshterul give him a funny look. He didn't care. Just because people were people, that didn't mean everybody loved everybody else. Oh, no. Not even close.

Several days later than Hasso thought it should have, the Bucovinan army moved west from Falticeni. He used the time as well as he could. He made sure every pot of gunpowder and every metal shell the army was taking with it had a little bit of dragon bone inside or on it. Accidents could still happen: a spark, a fire. You treated gunpowder with the proper respect and made those as unlikely as you could. And now he'd magicproofed the powder, too. Or he hoped like anything he had.

He began to believe the dragon bones would do what he wanted them to do. Aderno and Velona hadn't come close to troubling him since he started wearing his dragon-fang amulet. He didn't believe they weren't trying to bother him anymore. They had every reason to hurt him if they didn't kill him. If they couldn't… then the amulet was working the way he had in mind.

By now, almost everybody in Lord Zgomot's army wore an amulet. Artisans with saws and thongs had turned them out as fast as they could. Hasso knew Zgomot wore one himself: he'd given one to the Lord of Bucovin himself, and watched him put it on under his tunic. Zgomot wore a different tunic today on horseback, but the bulge was still there.

"I tried to shoot you last year," Hasso said, riding up alongside him.

"Yes, I know," Zgomot answered. "You killed one of my guards, and wounded two more."

"You don't hold it against me?" Hasso asked.

"If you had killed me, I would hold that against you," Zgomot said. Hasso laughed, as much in surprise as for any other reason — the Lord of Bucovin didn't make jokes, even wintry ones, very often. Zgomot went on, "As things stand, no. You were on the other side. You were doing what you could for Bottero. I might fault your taste, but not your loyalty. If you tried to shoot me now, I would hold that against you — and I would have good reason to, I think."

"So do I, Lord," Hasso said quickly. "I have no reason to do that."

"Well, I hope not," Lord Zgomot said. "We are giving you as much as we can. And I hope you stay happy with Drepteaza, and I hope she stays happy with you. I spent a lot of time worrying about that."

"I know, Lord," Hasso replied. Zgomot had damn near ordered her to go to bed with him for what the Reich would have called national-security reasons. The only problem was, Drepteaza didn't take orders like that worth a damn. Hasso thanked whatever gods happened to be in business locally that she'd eventually found reasons of her own. He said, "I am very happy. I hope Drepteaza is, too."

"She cannot be too unhappy, or she would drop you. She has a mind and a will of her own," Zgomot said, which paralleled Hasso's thoughts of a moment before only too well. The native continued, "I have tried to ask her a time or two, but she does not always tell me all of what she thinks. She does not always tell anyone all of what she thinks."

Hasso nodded; it wasn't as if he hadn't also noticed that. "She is her own person, yes. I like the person she is."

"So do I, though not, I daresay, the same way." Zgomot smiled one of his crooked, knowing smiles. "Since you came to this world, you have been lovers with two women with minds of their own. Well, not all of Velona's mind is her own, since part of it belongs to the Lenello goddess, but you know what I mean. Attracting two women of that sort is a compliment to you."

"I would like it better if one of them didn't keep trying to kill me, Lord," Hasso said.

"Indeed. I can see how that might be so. But I assure you that you would like it less if they both did. If both of those two went after a man at the same time, I do not think he would last long."

"Neither do I," Hasso said, which was the truth. When he was coming back from trying to re-defect to the Lenelli, he'd had similar thoughts about Bottero and Zgomot. He couldn't make it here without one of them, not unless he aimed to go into the king business himself. And he didn't. He might like to carry whatever they gave you here instead of a Generalfeldmarschall's baton, but he had not the slightest desire to wear a crown.

Yes, if Bottero and Zgomot both wanted him dead, dead he would be. If Velona and Drepteaza both wanted him dead, dead he would be, too. He suspected he would enjoy dying a lot less in that case.

Suppose Velona didn't want him dead. Suppose she wanted him back. What would he do then? If he had any brains, he would stay with Drepteaza even so. If he had any brains… Being with Velona had nothing to do with brains. You went with Velona for the same reason a test pilot climbed into a new fighter plane's cockpit — to see what kind of thrills it would give you next. And Velona's thrills were a hell of a lot more exciting than any you could get from a lousy airplane.

Hasso shook his head. It was dead. It would never come back to life. He might miss it — he did miss it. If he spent all his time mooning over what was lost, he would lose sight of what he had. What he had was pretty goddamn special, too.

"The goddess' rules are different from anyone else's," Zgomot said quietly.

"Ja," Hasso said, and then did a double take. "Are you sure you are not a wizard, Lord?" He didn't like being so transparent. It was dangerous. And if Zgomot could read him like that, couldn't Drepteaza do the same thing?

"I am only a man, Hasso Pemsel," the Lord of Bucovin answered. "But I am a man who knows something of women — as much as a man can, anyhow. And I am a man who has heard a lot about the Lenello goddess. I am jealous of you — maybe only half an hour's worth of jealous, but jealous even so."

Half an hour's worth of jealous… That sounded about right. Would you throw away the chance for happiness for the rest of your life for half an hour? If the half-hour was with Velona, you just might. And for a while afterwards you might think you'd made a good bargain, too. If that wasn't power, what was it?

With a shiver, Hasso said, "Let's beat them, Lord." Zgomot nodded.