After the downfall

III

After laying a goddess on earth, getting presented to a mere king was a piece of cake. King Bottero was a great big man, as so many Lenelli seemed to be. Hasso didn't feel much shorter after he went to his knees in front of the massive, blocky throne than he did before. The king's guards murmured when Bottero rose and set a hand on Hasso's shoulder; maybe he didn't do that for every Hans, Franz, and Dietrich who got an audience.

Bottero gestured. Hasso got to his feet. Even standing, the top of his head came up to about the bottom of the king's nose. In Germany, he'd got used to looking at the tops of other people's heads. Most of the Lenelli could do it to him. He didn't like that, especially since his sandy hair was beginning to thin up there.

When the king said something, Hasso had to shrug. "I'm sorry, your Majesty. Don't speak much Lenello yet," he said. Velona had taught him your Majesty just before he went into the throne room. What was he supposed to call her? Your Divinity? She was divine, all right, but not in the theological sense of the word.

Bottero looked annoyed — not at Hasso, but at himself. He said something else. Then he called Aderno's name. The wizard came up and went to his knees. Bottero spoke to him, impatiently. Get up! Get up! It had to mean something like that. As Aderno rose, he said, "His Majesty says you look like one of us, so he forgot you weren't."

If I'm a Lenello, I look like a damn runt, Hasso thought. They couldn't shoot you for thinking, not if you kept your big mouth shut. Not even the Gestapo or the NKVD did that. "Tell his Majesty I'm glad to be here." I'm glad to be anywhere. I wasn't a good bet to still be breathing now.

As usual, Hasso heard the Lenello words without understanding them when the wizard spoke to the king. He couldn't follow Bottero's reply, either. But when Aderno spoke to him, he heard Lenello in his ears and what might as well have been German in his mind. "His Majesty says he is glad to have you — all the Lenelli are glad to have you — since you saved the goddess on earth from the Grenye savages."

"I was glad to do it," Hasso said. He'd been glad to do it even before Velona offered him what maidens — not that she was — used to call their all. After that…

After that, he would have followed her to Siam, or maybe to the moon.

What would he have done if she were small and dark and plain — Jewish-looking went through his mind — and the men chasing her were perfect Aryans? Would he have opened up on them anyway? Or would he have waited to find out what the hell was going on? He had no idea.

King Bottero spoke again. "Not half so glad as we were to have it done," Aderno translated.

"Where do we go from here?" Hasso asked. He'd seen the Fuhrer a couple of times, but never spoken to him. He would have been awed if he had. Talking to a king didn't awe him a bit. Talking to this king didn't, anyhow. If a Kaiser still ruled Germany, or even if he'd met George VI of England, that might have been different. But Bottero seemed no more than an ungodly tall man in odd fancy dress who wore a gold circlet with ball-topped knobs sticking up from it.

He did have an impressive bass rumble. Aderno's lighter voice turned his words into ones that made sense to Hasso: "You did us a service. I hope you will take service with us. I have heard you know fighting tricks we would all do well to learn, and I have also heard the power dwells in you."

Hasso started to say he didn't know anything about the power. At the last second, he clamped down on that. The less he gave away, the better off he was likely to stay. And so all that came out was, "I'll be happy to join you, your Majesty."

After the wizard turned that into Lenello, King Bottero's ice-blue eyes suddenly twinkled. A grin pulled up the outer corners of his mouth. He set a massive hand on Hasso's shoulder and said something in what could only be a man- to- man tone. Hasso figured out the likely translation even before Aderno gave it: "I'll bet you will. She's quite a woman, isn't she?"

"Yes, your Majesty." Hasso could say that in Lenello. He would have meant it no matter what language he used. Then he eyed the king's roguish expression in a different way. Was he imagining things, or did Bottero sound as if he knew exactly what he was talking about?

The Wehrmacht officer didn't see any polite way to ask the king. Maybe he would be able to find a polite way to ask Velona. Or maybe he didn't want to know.

Then Bottero spoke again, and Hasso found out whether he wanted to or not. "His Majesty makes himself remember you are a foreigner, and so you are not used to our ways," Aderno said. He waited for Hasso to nod, then went on, "He will borrow the goddess for the coming summer solstice, as he does each solstice and equinox. No doubt, he says, you have some such customs in your own land."

"No doubt," Hasso said tonelessly. He'd heard of pagan fertility rites, but he'd never dreamt they might matter to him. And what the hell was he supposed to say when the king told him, Hey, I'm going to borrow your girlfriend for a night? If he said, No, you're not, chances were he'd be shorter by a head. And if he said no to Velona, she was liable to laugh at him. If she was the goddess on earth, wasn't this part of her job requirement?

"You don't say much," King Bottero observed through Aderno. He might be the size of a draft horse, but he was no dummy.

"What am I supposed to say?" Hasso made himself shrug. "If it doesn't bother Velona, how can I squawk?"

Bottero laughed when he heard that. "I knew you were a sensible fellow," he said, and gave Hasso a slap on the back that almost knocked him sprawling. "When you get right down to it, the women do the deciding."

"Ja," Hasso agreed with a crooked smile. Pagan fertility rites or not, this world and the one he'd escaped weren't so very different. He turned to Aderno. "If I take service here, I know whose service I'm joining. Who's on the other side?"

"A wise question. You should always know your foes at least as well as your friends," the wizard said. The Wehrmacht officer grunted. Hitler should have thought about that before he got into a war against both the USA and the USSR. If the Fuhrer had, Hasso wouldn't have been standing here right now. Aderno went on, "You would serve his Majesty against the other Lenello kingdoms, except the ones that are allies."

Hasso nodded. "That makes sense."

But Aderno wasn't done. "And you would serve him in ensuring that the Grenye in his kingdom know their place — know it and keep it."

"Fair enough." If you were going to rule people you'd conquered, they had to respect you. Hasso had seen that in Russia. Let them think they were as good as you were and there'd be hell to pay. The Germans had paid it, too.

"And" — now Aderno seemed like someone holding his nose against a bad smell that wouldn't go away — "there is Bucovin." When King Bottero heard the name, he made a horrible face, too.

"Bucovin?" Hasso echoed, as he was no doubt meant to do.

"The heart of the Grenye infection," Aderno said grimly. He pointed. "It lies to the east."

Bottero spoke. "His Majesty says the Grenye lie all the time, and from any direction."

"Heh," Hasso said. How close to the border was Castle Svarag? Had Velona been escaping from Bucovin? If she had, why didn't the people on her heels carry anything better than peasant weapons? All kinds of interesting questions. But a bigger one occurred to Hasso: "You have magic and the Grenye don't?"

"Certainly." Aderno drew himself up like an affronted cat. "We are Lenelli, after all, and they are only Grenye." When the wizard translated the question for the king, Bottero's big head bobbed up and down.

"Right," Hasso said. He hoped the sarcasm wouldn't make it through the translation spell. To try to blunt it if it did, he went on, "What I don't understand is, if you can work magic and they can't, why didn't you beat them a long time ago?" He thought of the conquistadors with their guns and horses and dogs and iron armor, and of the Indians who'd gone down in windrows before them.

Again, Aderno turned the question into Lenello for his king. "We're getting there," Bottero said. "Our ships only found this land two centuries ago. We've pushed the savages back a long way from the sea. But Bucovin… Bucovin is difficult." He nodded again, seeming pleased he'd found the right word.

Hitler would have said that about the Russians in 1942. And he would have been right — much righter than he knew then, in fact. The Reich and the Russians were both behind Hasso forever now. So I'm in the New World, am I? he thought. Bottero didn't look a bit like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and probably nothing like what's-his-name, Roosevelt's replacement, either.

None of that brainfuzz mattered a pfennig's worth to the Lenelli. "Difficult how?" Hasso asked, as any soldier might. Aderno didn't look happy about translating the question. King Bottero didn't look happy about answering it, either. He bit off some harsh-sounding words. "When we attacked the Grenye there, we had a couple of armies come to grief." Aderno echoed what the king said so Hasso could understand. "We don't know exactly why."

"Did they somehow learn magic on their own?" Hasso thought about Indians learning to ride horses and shoot guns.

But the wizard shook his head. After he translated the question, so did the king. This time, Aderno showed no hesitation in answering on his own: "It is not possible. They are Grenye, and mindblind. There are no wizards among them. There never have been. There never will be. There never can be."

Slavs are Untermenschen. All we have to do is hit them a good lick and they'll fall over, went through the German's mind. How much baggage he brought from the world he'd fled! Would he ever escape it? How could he? It made him what he was.

Something he'd seen in this world occurred to him. "When we rode into Drammen, do you remember that drunken Lenello with the Grenye girlfriend we saw?"

By Aderno's expression, he might have stuck pins under the wizard's fingernails. Very unwillingly, Aderno nodded. Even more unwillingly, he said, "I remember." The king barked a question. Most unwillingly of all, Aderno translated Hasso's question. What Bottero said after that should have scorched paint off the walls. When the king ran down, Aderno found a question of his own: "Why do you ask?" In contrast to his sovereign's words, his might have been carved off a glacier.

"I was wondering whether some Lenello renegade might have made magic for Bucovin if the Grenye couldn't do it on their own," Hasso said.

Again, King Bottero had to ask his wizard for a translation. When he got one, he did some more cursing, but then shook his head and answered the question. "There was no magic used against us," he said flatly. "None. We failed anyhow, failed twice, failed badly. Our own magic faltered there. Other Lenello kingdoms have failed, too. Bucovin is… difficult. We have not sent an army there for a while. Maybe we will try again before too long — there has been talk of it. But we will be wary if we do."

"I see." Hasso wasn't sure he did. Plainly, though, the Lenelli didn't see what had gone wrong against the… difficult Bucovin, either.

Bottero gave him a crooked grin. "Now that you know my realm's old shame, outlander, will you still take service with me against my enemies, whoever they may be?"

What would the king and the wizard do if he said no? They'd throw him out on his ear, that was what. And so would Velona, and he'd deserve it. What would happen to him them? Would he end up a drunken stumblebum in the Grenye part of town?

He hadn't crossed worlds for that. He gave Bottero his own salute, arm thrust out ahead of him. "Yes, your Majesty!"

The ritual that followed came straight from the Middle Ages. Following Aderno's instructions, Hasso dropped to both knees again and held out his hands clasped together. King Bottero enfolded them in his own big mitts. "I am your man," Hasso said, prompted by Aderno. "I pledge you my full faith against all men who may live and die, so help me God." A Lenello would have sworn by the goddess, he supposed. He wondered if Aderno would correct him, but the wizard let it go.

Bottero hauled him to his feet with effortless ease. The king wasn't just a big man; he was strong, too. He leaned forward and kissed Hasso on both cheeks. They were big, smacking kisses, the kind a Russian might have given — no French sophistication here.

"You are my man. I accept your homage. By the goddess, I will do nothing to make myself not deserve it," Bottero said through the wizard. "I welcome you to my service."

"Thank you, your Majesty." Hasso felt better because of the oath he'd sworn. Now he had a real place here. He belonged. He didn't know all of what that place entailed yet, but he could find out. He wasn't just somebody who'd fallen from nowhere. He was one of King Bottero's men. All the Lenelli would understand that. So would the Grenye.

A couple of small, dark servants came into the throne room. They started sweeping and dusting. None of the Lenelli paid any attention to them; they might have been part of the furniture. As they worked, they chattered in low voices in a croaking, guttural language that sounded nothing like Lenello.

"What are they saying?" Hasso asked Aderno.

The wizard shrugged. "I have no idea. It could only matter to another Grenye."

"Doesn't your translation spell work on their language?" Hasso couldn't imagine why it wouldn't. Why have a translation spell if you weren't going to use it to understand a tongue you didn't speak?

"It would," Aderno said with the air of a man making a great concession. "But why would I care to listen to Grenye grunting? I'd just as soon listen to what the king's hunting hounds had to say."

Hasso would have been interested to hear what dogs had to say, too. All the same… "Bottero's hounds won't plot to murder you in your bed one fine night." He knew the risk of keeping Russian servants on the Eastern Front. Some Germans got by with it. A lot of Russians hated Stalin worse than Hitler. But Hasso had never been tempted. It would have been just his luck to draw somebody who was playacting.

King Bottero laughed when the wizard told him what the German's words meant. "These are also my dogs," the king said, waving toward the Grenye. "They will not bite."

He seemed very sure of himself, and of his servants. Hasso glanced at the Grenye again. They went about their work with their heads down, and seemed to pay little more heed to the Lenelli than their masters did to them. But a certain slight stiffness in the way they moved made Hasso sure they understood Lenello, even if the Lenelli didn't bother to understand them.

"Goddess on earth?" Hasso asked Velona, the Lenello words strange in his mouth.

They lay side by side on the bed of his small chamber in Castle Drammen. No matter what Velona was, he was only a new vassal of ambiguous rank. Chances were he got a chamber of his own only because she fancied him. Otherwise, he would have drawn a cot or a straw pallet in the common room with the belching, farting, snoring ordinary soldiers.

He wouldn't have minded. He'd done that often enough. But this was much, much better.

The bed was small, too, which meant he and Velona touched even when they lay side by side. The tip of her breast just brushed the skin of his arm. She smelled of clean sweat and cinnamon. If she was a goddess, she was a very human one.

She nodded, which made shadows swoop across the promontories of her face. The only light in the room came from a lamp that sputtered and added the odor of hot mutton fat to the air. "That's right," she said.

"What does it mean?" Hasso asked the question a dozen times a day.

Velona looked surprised when he asked now. "What it says, of course."

"What is that?" Things Hasso wanted to say bubbled up inside him: how in his world there were no goddesses on earth, or even gods; how God Himself seemed far away, if He was there at all; how the age of miracles, or the age when people believed in miracles, was long gone.

And yet a little miracle, or something a hell of a lot like one, had brought him here from burning Berlin. But even if the Fuhrer was as close to a god on earth as people knew in these grimly rational days, it would have taken more than a little miracle to save the Reich from the clutches of the Russian bear, the American eagle, and the British lion.

Speaking German, all that would have burst free in a torrent of words. In Lenello, he was limited to questions that made him sound like a Dummkopf. Sooner or later, he would understand more. He'd been through enough to teach him patience the hard way.

"You really don't know." Velona sounded amazed.

"I really don't know." Hasso hoped he got the conjugation right.

She laughed — not at him, he didn't think. "The goddess lives in me," she said, touching the inside of her left breast to show what she meant. "Sometimes I am Velona, sometimes I am the goddess, sometimes I am the goddess and Velona at the same time." She spoke slowly and simply to give him a chance to understand.

"How to know — how I to know — which?" he asked.

He wondered if she would laugh again, but she didn't. "When I ran out of Bucovin, the goddess filled me. I could not have run like that if she hadn't. Those Grenye you saw chasing me, those weren't the first ones who came after me. I left the others in the dust."

"I understand," he said after a bit. Her explanation wasn't smooth. She backed and filled and used different words and gestured and sat up in bed and acted out what she meant. He never got tired of watching her. Goddess or Velona, she was the most alive person he'd ever met, and it wasn't even close.

"Good!" Her eyes flashed brighter than the feeble rays from that smelly mutton — fat lamp should have let them do. "But even the goddess fills only a woman. Those churls would have caught me if you hadn't — " She imitated the noise from the Schmeisser again. She kissed him. "Thank you."

"Happy. Glad." Hasso drew her to him. "Big glad!" She laughed. Then he asked, "Make love with goddess? Or make love with Velona?"

"Oh, that was me," she said, and pointed at herself to make sure he got it. "The goddess went out of me when I didn't need her any more. That was one reason I was so worn there for a little while." Again, she worked at what she was saying till she was sure he followed. She was a good teacher… and learning a language from a lover had incentives a tutor with a mustache and a tweed jacket couldn't hope to match.

If the goddess possessed her some of the time, what was it like when possession ended? In his own world, he would have taken her talk for metaphor. Here? He kept an open mind. He'd seen enough strange things to make him unsure where metaphor left off and magic began. And if magic worked, why couldn't there be a literal goddess?

No reason he could see, no reason at all.

"What about with King Bottero?" he asked. He hoped he didn't sound too jealous. He didn't feel too jealous, but he wasn't altogether easy about it.

"Oh, with him I am the goddess and me both," Velona answered matter- of-factly. "The seasons need renewing, and this is how we do it. And he is a man, and I am a woman, and that is how men and women do it. You ought to know." She poked him in the ribs.

"Well, yes," he said. She made it sound so reasonable. The only thing wrong was that what happened between men and women wasn't reasonable. No matter how people tried, they couldn't make it reasonable, either. They couldn't in the world he came from, anyhow. He didn't think the Lenelli and Grenye were much different.

Velona laughed. "In fact…" she said. Sure enough, he'd just bumped her belly. They started all over again. He hadn't thought a man his age could perform the way he did. But then, he hadn't had inspiration like this, either.

Afterwards, he wished for a cigarette. Even the ones the German quartermasters doled out, that tasted of hay and horseshit instead of honest tobacco, would have been better than nothing. But he'd had them in the back pocket of his trousers when he landed in the swamp here, and they got ruined. Too damn bad.

"Is it better now?" Velona might have been soothing a little boy. Her methods were different — were they ever! — but not her tone.

"Well, yes," Hasso said again. And it was, too, and it would stay that way till the summer solstice, or till he thought about the summer solstice, or till he ran into King Bottero, or for a little while, anyhow.

What could he do about it, any which way? Tell the goddess not to do what the goddess did? Velona would laugh in his face. He'd be lucky if Bottero only laughed. He could go from vassal to victim in the time the king took to snap his fingers.

And so… And so what? he wondered. If he couldn't stand the idea, the only thing he could do was break off with Velona. The king would still keep him around, as a soldier, as an unarmed — combat instructor, and maybe in the hope that he could teach the Lenelli to make firearms. They wouldn't turn out Schmeissers any time in the next few hundred years. If he could make black powder, though, they might manage cannons and matchlock muskets. And cannons ought to be plenty to win him a field marshal's baton, or whatever they used here instead of one.

So he could make his way here without Velona if he wanted to. He thought so, anyhow. But did he want to? If he did, he figured he needed to check his brain for working parts. If she had to do what a goddess had to do, he figured he could live through it.

"It'll be all right," he told himself.

"What?" Velona asked, and he realized he'd spoken not only out loud but in German.

"All good," he said in Lenello, and hoped he meant it.

The master-at-arms at Castle Drammen was a fellow named Orosei. He wasn't particularly big for a Lenello — only a couple of centimeters taller than Hasso — but he was in perfect shape. As they faced each other in the courtyard, stripped to the waist, the German could see as much. He wasn't bad himself, but Orosei had not a gram of fat and muscles like steel bands.

Soldiers watched the faceoff. Hasso was starting to understand bits of Lenello. They figured he was crazy — nobody in his right mind messed with Orosei. Eyeing his opponent, Hasso thought they had a point.

He'd done this at Castle Svarag, but Orosei looked like a much rougher customer than Sholseth or his buddies. This guy didn't just have muscle. He had technique, too. Hasso could see that at a glance.

"So you know tricks, do you?" Orosei said. His gaze went here, there, everywhere. He wouldn't give himself away by eyeing his target before he went after it.

Hasso shrugged. "Maybe a few."

"Well, let's get on with it," Orosei said. "Nothing personal, you understand." I make my living squashing people. You're just another one.

"Nothing personal," Hasso agreed. If I can beat you, I look like a big deal. You're in the way — like Poland.

They circled warily. Hasso took it on faith that Orosei was good. The master-at-arms didn't seem inclined to take chances on anybody. Once things started happening, fights could — often did — end in seconds. Someone would make a mistake or just move an instant slower than he should have, and that would be that.

"Did you come here to fight or to dance?" Orosei asked. In the middle of the question, without warning or even raising his voice, he sprang.

The next few seconds were one of those frantic flurries that happened when two pros went at each other without any rules. One of Orosei's boots thudded into Hasso's chest — not quite in his solar plexus and not quite hard enough to break ribs. The Lenello's thumb didn't quite take out Hasso's left eye, either — and Hasso didn't think he quite broke it when he bent it back. He got in some licks of his own, too.

They broke apart again. Orosei would sport a mouse under one eye, and he definitely had hurt that hand. He saluted Hasso Lenello — style, clenched fist over his heart. "You're good, all right," he said. "We can use you."

"You are good, too." Hasso didn't like plodding through a language he barely spoke, but he had no choice.

They circled some more. Hasso fired a kick at Orosei's knee. Orosei grabbed his foot and launched him, then jumped on him like a starving tiger. But Hasso had expected to get thrown, and greeted him with a boot in the belly. It was like kicking planks, but it got the master-at-arms off him.

Orosei bounced to his feet. He saluted again, saying, "You're bloody good. Show me those flips I've heard about."

"We go slow?" Hasso asked, and the master-at-arms nodded. Hasso knew a moment's relief that he'd proved himself without getting maimed and without wrecking the other guy, who was bound to have friends in high places. He said, "Come at me — not very fast."

Orosei did. He made a perfect practice partner. Hasso grabbed his outthrust arm, twisted, got him on his hip, and flipped him over his shoulder. Orosei thudded down on his back with a big grin on his face. He sprang up. "That's good, by the goddess! Do it again!"

Hasso sent him ass over teakettle a couple of more times at half speed, and then at something closer to full speed. Orosei was a glutton for getting things right. If he took some bruises doing it, he didn't care.

"Let me try," he said when he thought he had it.

"Half speed," Hasso said, and the master-at-arms nodded. Hasso approached. He extended his arm. Orosei twisted and flipped him smooth as could be. Hasso hadn't expected anything different — this guy was a pro.

He proved what a pro he was a moment later. After he'd tossed Hasso around three or four times, he said, "That is the move, and it's very fine. What is the counter?"

"Ah!" Now Hasso gave him a German — style salute. "Good question! Right question! I come half speed. You — " He mimed doing the flip. "You see."

Some of the soldiers drifted off when they found that Hasso and Orosei weren't going to ruin each other for their entertainment. Others crowded closer to watch Hasso show the master-at-arms how not to get thrown. A lot of them wanted to try the moves themselves, on one another and on the men who really knew how to do them.

"You're better than I am," Orosei said after a while. "I have to think about it, and you just do it."

"Practice," Hasso said with another shrug. How many times had he done those flips? On the other hand… "Me and sword? Bad." He made a face to show how bad.

"But you've got that fire-spitting pellet crossbow," Orosei said: a pretty good description of a Schmeisser from somebody who'd never heard of the Industrial Revolution. "Do all the soldiers where you come from carry those?" Orosei asked. When Hasso nodded, the master-at-arms winced. "You must kill each other before you get close enough for swords."

"Mostly." Hasso nodded again. Orosei wasn't just a hardnose with quick reflexes. He had brains. That figured. He was more or less a regimental sergeant major, so he'd better not be a dummy — especially right under the king's eye.

The Lenello tossed him a spearshaft with a bundle of rags at the end instead of a point. "You know what to do with this?"

"Some," Hasso answered.

"Let's see." Orosei took a practice pike, too, and did his best to stick Hasso like a pig. When Hasso showed he could handle himself, Orosei whacked him on the back. "Yeah, you're pretty decent. How come, when you don't know what to do with a blade?"

As best Hasso could, he explained about bayonets. Then he said, "Wait, please," and hurried back to his chamber. He returned with his entrenching tool. "Fight with this, too." He demonstrated some of the unkind things you could do with the metal blade.

Orosei watched with interest, then hefted the entrenching tool himself. "Nice little thing," he said with an appreciative nod. "You dig holes so the pellets don't dig holes in you?"

"Yes," Hasso said. Orosei got it, all right.

"And it's a fine close-in weapon, too," the master-at-arms said. "Handy to have both in the same package." He handed the entrenching tool back. Hasso was beaming as he took it. He and Orosei didn't have many words in common, but they spoke the same language anyway.

By the time the summer solstice rolled around, Hasso could read and even write a bit. His progress amazed the lame, white-haired Lenello who taught him. But old Dastel was used to teaching people who'd never met letters before. Hasso understood the idea that each sign stood for one sound just fine. So what if the Lenelli used thirty-four characters? So what if they wrote from right to left like Semitic Untermenschen?. As soon as Hasso memorized which squiggle sounded like what, he could read as well as anybody — and better than most, because people here had a habit of muttering their words as they read them. His biggest problem was his limited vocabulary. Learning to read helped there, too. Words on a page didn't vanish into thin air the way spoken ones did.

Pages were parchment or something like that. Words were written by hand, with reed pens or goose quills. No Gutenberg here, not yet. I could do that, too, Hasso thought. Or would the wizards get mad at me for unfair competition?

As the longest day of the year drew close, anticipation built in Castle Dram — men and in the city surrounding it. In the castle, Grenye servants lugged casks of wine and barrels of beer up from the cellars. The cellarmaster, an immensely fat Lenello, kept a stern eye on things to make sure the casks and barrels didn't get broached too soon.

More Grenye dug trenches in the courtyard and chopped wood to fill them and set up enormous spits to turn roasting carcasses above them. The swarthy little natives seemed as excited about the upcoming holiday as their overlords. Why not? They'd be able to get drunk and make pigs of themselves. They didn't get to do that very often.

As the solstice approached, Hasso got drunk several times. He tried giving Velona hints that he wasn't happy. She had to know why; she was nobody's fool. But she affected not to understand, no doubt thinking that better than a raging brawl. And she showed no sign whatever that she didn't intend to lay King Bottero.

Some of the Lenelli chased Grenye women more as the solstice neared. The big blond men seemed to do a bit of that all the time. The Grenye had a hard time saying no, and their menfolk took their lives in their hands if they presumed to challenge their superiors. The Lenelli had the power of law behind them, and the power of size, and the power of military training.

And a good many Grenye women didn't want to say no. Hasso had seen that before, in France and in Russia. Losers' women were often easy. Sometimes they saw the other side's victorious soldiers as, literally, meal tickets. You could do better for yourself in an occupier's bed than in one where you slept all alone. Occupiers also had a kind of glamour because they were victorious, in stark contrast to your own worthless odds and sods who couldn't defend the country against them.

Sometimes, also, people fell in love, and who'd been on which side to start with hardly seemed to matter. Those were the affairs that turned out best — and worst. They could lead to marriages, despite regulations. Or they could lead to disaster when a soldier got transferred or when somebody decided who was on which side counted after all.

Hasso wondered what would happen if Velona caught him with a little dark Grenye. Actually, he didn't wonder. She would scream. She would break things. She would throw things. She would throw him — out.

To him, her joining Bottero seemed as much a betrayal as that would have been. But she couldn't see it from his point of view. If he tried to tell a Catholic woman not to take communion, she'd spit in his eye. And Velona wasn't just a woman taking communion. She was a priestess giving communion, too. She was the deity for whom communion was given. No wonder she wouldn't listen to him. He could see that.

He hated it anyway.

Much good it did him. Horns and drums woke him at sunrise, welcoming the longest day of the year with a raucous racket. He hadn't got too smashed the night before. His head didn't hurt or anything. But he wasn't thrilled about rising with the birds — and he was, because he could hear them chirping somewhere not far enough away.

The alleged music woke Velona up, too. Seeing her smile at him from a few centimeters away went a long way toward reconciling him to being awake. "Big day today!" she said, the way anyone back home might have on a holiday morning.

"Yes." Hasso knew he sounded grumpy — hell, he sounded downright dismal — but he couldn't help it.

Velona laughed and poked him. "I do know what's bothering you," she said, and then she made damn sure it wouldn't bother him for a while. Afterwards, she kissed him and asked, "There — is it better now?"

"Yes." This time, he sounded happier about things. Velona kissed him again before she got out of bed. Even so, the real answer was yes and no.

He had that whole long day to brood about her going off to Bottero's bedchamber.

But it turned out to be even worse. Grenye servants set up a bed in the middle of the courtyard. They aren't going to — ? Hasso thought, scandalized.

But they were. As sunset neared, an enormous crowd gathered around the bed, eating and drinking and talking and waiting expectantly. Bottero came out of the castle and pushed his way through. He was naked as the day he was born, but much bigger. "Goddess!" he boomed, standing by the bed. "I summon you, goddess!"

Velona came out, too. The crowd cleared by itself for her. Her golden nakedness might well have been divine; it seemed to draw all the fading light to itself. "I come, your Majesty!" she answered. "I come!"

They lay down on the bed together, right there in front of everybody. They did, and then she did, loudly. Hasso got very drunk.