After the downfall

XIV

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue… Hasso had heard that somewhere, but damned if he could remember where. His first good look at Falticeni, even before he got inside the town, called the jingle to mind again.

The lower courses of stonework on the walls of Bucovin's capital looked half as old as time. The stones weren't shaped into neat square blocks; the idea didn't seem to have crossed the minds of the Grenye who'd put them there. The big gray masses of granite or whatever the rock was had just been trimmed to fit together. And they did. Despite the lichen and moss that had been growing on them for God only knew how many years, they looked sturdy and solid.

Then, suddenly, the wall got five or six meters taller. These stones were squared off. They looked much like the ones that formed the walls around Drammen and other towns in Bottero's kingdom. Plainly, the Bucovinans had realized the wall they had wasn't good enough to keep Lenelli out. Just as plainly, they'd learned from the men from overseas that squarish stones were a lot easier to handle than ones left in their original shapes.

And the towers that projected out from the wall might have been copied straight from Lenello fortifications. They gave defenders more places from which to shoot at attackers and to drop heavy things or hot things or pointed things on their unfortunate heads. Even the crenelated battlements were lifted from works farther west. The soldiers pacing those battlements, though, were indubitably Bucovinans.

"It is a great city, yes?" Rautat said proudly.

"It is a great city, yes." Hasso made it a point never to disagree with anybody who could order him chopped into cat's meat. It certainly was a big city, anyway. To his surprise, it looked at least twice the size of King Bottero's capital.

Its entryway boasted a stout iron portcullis. Like the towers, that was an obviously modern addition. Like all the entryways Hasso had seen here — and like all the ones he'd seen at castles in Europe — Falticeni's had a dogleg to the right. That made attackers trying to swarm through expose their left sides, the side on which their hearts lay, to whatever the defenders could do to them.

Hasso glanced up. No murder hole in the ceiling. The natives hadn't thought of such a thing when the entryway was built, and excavating one out of solid stone would have been too much work. He couldn't deny the position was plenty strong without one. Had Bottero's army reached Falticeni, it wouldn't have had such an easy time breaking in.

Rautat and the other Bucovinans escorting Hasso went back and forth with the guards at the entryway. The Wehrmacht officer understood not a word of what they said. Their language, of course, was no more related to Lenello than Cherokee was to English. He sighed mournfully. Just when he started getting fluent… he had to start over. Yes, some of these people spoke Lenello. Some Russians spoke German, too. That didn't mean they enjoyed doing it.

Rautat pointed to him and gave a pretty good impression of a Schmeisser going off. He's the guy — or maybe, He's the son of a bitch — with the thunderstick. Hasso could guess what the commentary meant, even if he didn't know words or grammar. The gate guards looked and sounded suitably impressed. Sure, they were natives, but they were also people. He could read their expressions and their tone of voice. And a whole fat lot of good that may do me, too.

"I take you to the palace," Rautat told him. "The lord will want to talk to you."

Hasso made himself nod, made himself seem calm. But do I want to talk to him? That would have been funny, if only it were funny. Do I have a choice? He had the choice the native named when capturing him: he could die. He didn't want to do that. Of course, the Bucovinans hadn't got to work on him yet, either.

The guards stepped aside, waving Hasso and his escorts around the last kink in the entryway and into Falticeni. Not without pride, Rautat gave a wave of his own. "This is our city," he said.

At first, it looked a lot like the Grenye districts in Drammen. Streets were narrow and winding and muddy, and they stank. Most of the houses and shops Hasso could see were of wattle and daub, with thatched roofs. Big ones sat next to small ones with no order Hasso could find. None seemed to be more than two stories high.

That meant Hasso could see what had to be the royal palace in the middle of town. As the reconstructed wall aped Lenello fortifications, so the palace imitated Lenello castles. Even the red clay semicylindrical roof tiles copied the ones the Lenelli used. The local lord might have been saying, See? All the modern conveniences. We can do this stuff, too.

Getting there was less than half the fun. Nobody already in the streets wanted to let newcomers by. Scrawny dogs yapped and snarled and made as if to bite the horses' fetlocks. Scrawny children of all sizes from toddlers on up raced around like maniacs, some wailing, others yelling at the top of their lungs. A few paused to stare at the spectacle of a big blond captive going through their streets. Hasso didn't think the things they shouted were endearments.

One kid bent to scoop up a handful of mud, or maybe manure, and throw it at him. Hasso ducked. The stuff flew over his head and splatted against a wall across the street. Rautat yelled at the kid. The brat bent over and showed off his bare backside, which was as skinny as the rest of him. Rautat made as if to kick it. He couldn't come close, not without dismounting. The kid scampered off.

"Thanks," Hasso said.

"Oh, I didn't do it for you," the Bucovinan replied. "I just want to make sure you're in one piece when I deliver you, so they can get the answers they need."

You're nothing to me but an interesting piece of meat. That was daunting. But if Hasso weren't an interesting piece of meat, Rautat would have slit his throat and gone on to the next one in the pit.

"Well, thanks anyhow," Hasso said.

Rautat gave him a long look. "You've got nerve, anyway," he said grudgingly.

Hasso shrugged. "Big deal."

"You talk like a soldier," the native remarked.

"I am — I was — a soldier before I came here, in a bigger war than this world ever saw," Hasso answered. "The tools of the trade were different. The life isn't, not very much."

Outside a tavern, a drunk in ragged clothes sprawled in the street snoring, a jug clutched tight to his chest. Hasso could have seen — hell, he had seen — the like in any number of Russian villages… and, yes, in some German ones as well. People were people, in his own world or here, Lenelli or Grenye. Rautat scowled at the sot and rode a little faster to get by him. Hasso hid a smile. The native was self-conscious about his folk's shortcomings, as almost anyone from any folk would have been.

They rode past a brothel, too, with a couple of naked women displaying themselves in second-story windows. Hasso thought they were more likely to catch pneumonia than customers. They gaped at him, for a moment startled out of their cocked-hip, bosom-thrusting poses.

One of them called something to Rautat. He laughed and shook his head. Turning to Hasso, he said, "She wants to know if you're really big."

Hasso was made… like a man. He said, "But you think all Lenelli are big pricks." The joke worked in Lenello the same as it did in German. Odds were it worked in most languages.

Rautat laughed and laughed. "You're a funny fellow, all right. Pretty soon, you'll find out whether it does you any good."

"Ja." Hasso didn't like the sound of that.

In Drammen, the Lenello nobles had their fine houses in the center of town, near the royal palace. Broad lawns separated those mansions from the streets and from the lesser dwellings of hoi polloi. Again, the Bucovinans imitated the newcomers… to a point. Their prominent people did have large houses. Sometimes the buildings even had stone ground floors. But the second story was invariably timber or wattle and daub, and almost all the roofs were thatched. Only a handful had tiles like the palace.

Almost all of them, though, had a garden rather than a lawn — or if they did have grass, a cow or a couple of sheep grazed on it under a herdsman's watchful eyes. The idea of bare ground for the sake of decoration or swank didn't seem to have got here from the west.

A plump man in a tunic with extra-fancy embroidery took a chicken from someone who looked poorer than he was. He wrung the chicken's neck and cast the carcass onto a brazier heaped high with glowing charcoal. '"What's he doing?" Hasso asked.

"He's a priest making a thanks-offering or a sin-offering for that fellow." Rautat gave him a curious look. "Don't your priests do that?"

Hasso thought of the last Wehrmacht chaplain he'd talked to, a dour Lutheran who didn't even smoke (and, once again, the longing for a cigarette sneaked up and bit him in the ass). He tried to imagine Klaus Frisch sacrificing a chicken to propitiate an angry Jehovah. "Well," he said, "no."

"How do you know your gods pay any attention to you, then?" Rautat persisted.

"Good question," Hasso said, and then, counterattacking, "How do you know your gods do? Why don't you follow the goddess?"

Even riding through the streets of his own capital with the Wehrmacht officer a helpless prisoner, Rautat looked scared shitless. "The goddess hears Lenelli first," he said. "She wouldn't listen to the likes of me."

From what Hasso had seen, that might well be true. And yet… "Plenty of Grenye in King Bottero's realm worship her."

The most scornful majordomo in two worlds couldn't have let out a sniffier sniff than Rautat's. "There are Grenye who want to be Lenelli," he said."I don't, thank you very much."

He spoke fluent Lenello. He wore Lenello-style armor. His city had Lenello-style fortifications grafted onto its older works. His sovereign's palace even had Lenello-style roof tiles. And he said he didn't want to be a Lenello?

Well, maybe he didn't. The Japanese wore Western-style clothes. They had Western-style industries, and a Western-style military, too. But did they want to turn into Americans or Englishmen or Germans? Hasso didn't think so. They used Western techniques to let them stay what they already were: Japanese. Maybe the Bucovinans could pull off the same stunt here.

But, if they couldn't work magic and the Lenelli damn well could, the odds were against them.

Still affronted, Rautat went on, "Besides, who knows what mongrel clans those Grenye come from? We're better people than that, we are."

Once more, Hasso carefully didn't smile. Had the plains Indians looked down their noses like that at the coastal Indians who quickly succumbed to the English colonizers? They probably had… till it was their turn.

When Hasso got a close look at Lord Zgomot's palace, he decided he wouldn't want to try to take it without heavy artillery. Yes, maybe Bottero was lucky he didn't make it to Falticeni. He might have thrown away a lot more men here than he did in the lost battle.

Or the goddess might have manifested herself through Velona and knocked the capital of Bucovin flat. If you had magic, if the gods really did take part in what happened on earth, maybe you didn't need 105s and 155s. After all, Joshua knocked down Jericho's walls without them.

Every time Hasso thought about anybody from the Old Testament, he started to look around nervously. No, dummy, he thought. Nobody from the Gestapo's going to haul you away, not here. You can let a Jew cross your mind every now and then.

Rautat shouted to the sentries in their own language. They yelled back. Hasso couldn't understand a word of it. His mind went back to wandering. If the goddess could come through here, why didn't she do it a long time ago? The land fights for them. Velona wasn't the only one who'd said it. What did it mean? It wasn't magic — the Lenelli insisted on that. But it was something.

One of the guards yelled some more, and gestured. Rautat and the other Bucovinan soldiers dismounted. A moment later, Hasso did the same. Grooms came out to take charge of the horses. Hasso's captors escorted him into the palace.

The palace was gloomy. It was drafty. It didn't smell very good. Of course, you could have said the same things about King Bottero's establishment. Everything here, though, seemed just a little worse, a little sloppier, than it had back in Drammen.

And Hasso found one danger here that he hadn't had to worry about there: doorways. Lots of Lenelli were taller than he was. Their lintels were high. The Bucovinans, on the other hand, mostly came up to his chin. And he banged his forehead twice in quick succession before realizing he had to watch — and duck — every goddamn time.

Getting one — no, two — right above the eyes did nothing for the headaches that still plagued him. He wished his head would come off. Inconsiderate thing that it was, it stayed attached and hurt.

Rautat spoke with a court official whose spiffy embroidery probably meant he was a big wheel. The fellow with the gaudy tunic looked Hasso over. Him? his glance said. Well, Hasso didn't think he cut a very fancy figure just then, either. The palace functionary asked Rautat a couple of questions. Hasso's captor answered with emphasis, jabbing a forefinger at the other man's chest.

With a sigh, the official yielded. He said something to Hasso in Bucovinan. "I am sorry. I do not speak your language," Hasso answered in Lenello.

He wasn't astonished when the native turned out to know that tongue. "Come with me," the fellow said. "Your name is on a list. Lord Zgomot wanted to see certain folk if we captured them. Here you are, so he will see you."

"Here I am," Hasso agreed, so mournfully that Rautat laughed and the court official smiled a most unpleasant smile.

They led him down a hallway decorated with art of a sort he didn't think he'd ever seen before. For lack of a better name, he thought of the pieces as feather paintings. Some of them were quite realistic, others bands or swirling lines of color. They must have taken enormous labor to create, first in finding the feathers and then in arranging them.

"Nice work." Hasso pointed at one — a picture of the palace, done all in feathers. "Very pretty."

Rautat and the functionary both stared at him, then started to laugh. "By Lavtrig, now I know you're no ordinary big blond bastard! They all think featherwork is stupid and ugly and foolish because they don't do it themselves," Rautat said.

He spoke in Bucovinan to the soldiers escorting the Wehrmacht officer. They gaped at Hasso, too. Hasso couldn't remember any Lenelli ever talking about featherwork. It really must have been beneath their notice. He wondered why. It sure looked good to him.

Then they led him past what he first took to be a small elephant's tusk. But it was shaped more like a sword blade, and had a formidable point on the end. "What is that? What beast does it come from?" he asked.

"A dragon," Rautat answered matter-of-factly. "That is the greatest fang of the Dragon of Mizil, which we slew when Bucovin was young. His bones lie under the walls of Falticeni, and under the palace here."

"A dragon? What does a dragon look like?" Hasso asked.

They went on a little farther. Then the court functionary pointed to a big featherwork on the wall. "Behold the Dragon of Mizil!" he said.

Hasso beheld it. He wondered from which birds the natives had got those iridescent green and bronze feathers, or the yellow and orange and red ones that showed the fire it breathed. He also wondered whether the artists had actually seen the dragon or limned it from the stories of those who came before them. And he wondered… "How do you kill something like that?"

Together, Rautat and the court official burst into something between verse and song. After a moment, the rest of Hasso's guards joined in. Germans might have launched into "Deutschland uber Alles" or the "Ode to Joy" with as much ease and as little self-consciousness. Everybody in Falticeni had to know the story of the Dragon of Mizil.

Everybody but me, Hasso thought. And he didn't understand a word of Bucovinan. "Can you translate, please?" he said.

To his surprise, Rautat shook his head. "Not this," the soldier answered. "This is ours. This is special. This is not for Lenello dogfeet." He must have translated one of his own words literally, for he corrected himself a moment later: "Scoundrels." The palace flunky nodded agreement.

Hasso only shrugged. He was in no position to argue with them. They hadn't killed him. Except for when he went into the pit, they hadn't even hurt him. Yet. All things considered, he had to figure he was ahead of the game.

They turned a last corner. There was the throne room. There, on what looked like a dining-room chair wrapped in gold leaf, sat Lord Zgomot. The court official poked Hasso in the ribs with an elbow. "Bow!" he said.

Again, Hasso was in no position to argue. Bow he did. As he straightened, he sized up the ruler of Bucovin. King Bottero had put him in mind of Hermann Goring, Goring the way he had been before defeat and drugs diminished him: big, bold, swaggering, flamboyant, enjoying to the hilt the power that had landed in his lap.

Zgomot, by contrast, wore a mink coat that would have made Marlene Dietrich jealous, but still looked like nothing so much as the druggist in a small Romanian town. He was small himself, and skinny, with a pinched face, a beak of a nose, and a black beard streaked with gray.

His eyebrows were thick and black, too, and almost met in the middle. The dark eyes under them, though, seemed disconcertingly shrewd. He was taking Hasso's measure as Hasso studied him.

"So… You are the strange one, the one from nowhere, of whom we have heard." Unlike Rautat's or the functionary's, Zgomot's Lenello was almost perfect. The only hint that he wasn't a native speaker was the extremely precise way in which he expressed himself. He wasn't at ease in the language, as Bottero or Velona or Orosei would have been.

Poor Orosei, Hasso thought. He was glad the king and the goddess — the king and his lover — had got away. He wished like hell he'd got away himself.

But he damn well hadn't. And now he had to deal with this native — who was no doubt trying to figure out how to deal with him. "Yes, Lord," he said: he was who Zgomot claimed he was.

The Lord of Bucovin pursed his lips. He didn't look like a happy man, the way Bottero usually did. He had the air of someone whose stomach pained him. "Are you as dangerous as people say you are?" he asked.

"I don't know, your Majesty. How dangerous do people say I am?" Hasso answered.

"Don't you be insolent!" the palace official snapped.

"He is not being insolent," Zgomot said. "Most people never know what others say about them behind their back."

So there, Hasso thought. He got the idea lying to Zgomot wouldn't be smart, not if you had any chance of getting caught later on. "Lord, I don't know how dangerous I am. After I come here, I try to serve King Bottero as best I can, that's all," he said.

"You had the thunder weapon, yes?" Zgomot said. "You almost killed me with it in the first fight, yes?"

"Yes," Hasso admitted.

"And you're the one who came up with the column to strike with, yes?" the Lord of Bucovin persisted.

"Yes," Hasso said again, wondering if he was cooking his own goose.

"Then you're dangerous." Zgomot spoke in tones that brooked no contradiction. He eyed Hasso. "If you'd come here — to this place — in Bucovin instead of where you did, would you have served me as best you could instead of that big pig of a Bottero?"

You wouldn't have had Velona to persuade me. Persuade! Ha! That's a word! But if I'd come down by Falticeni, I wouldn't have known anything about Velona. And what a shame that would have been! The thoughts flickered through Hasso's mind in a fraction of a second. "I don't know, Lord. Probably," he replied aloud. "Unless your people kill me for being a Lenello, I mean."

"Chance you take when you're big and blond," Zgomot observed, his smile thin to the point of starvation. How big an inferiority complex did the Grenye carry? How could you blame them if it was about the size of the dragon whose fang they so proudly displayed? The Lord of Bucovin went on, "Since you are here now, will you serve me the way you served Bottero even though he didn't deserve you?"

This time, Hasso didn't answer right away. The easiest thing to do was say yes and then do his best to get away or minimize his contributions. But he remembered again what he thought of Field Marshal Paulus. And he knew what Wehrmacht troops thought of the Russians who fought for the Reich. You might use them — you might use them up — but you'd never, ever trust them.

Slowly, he said, "Lord, I am King Bottero's sworn man. How can I serve his enemy?" He wondered if he'd just written his own obituary.

"A good many Lenelli have no trouble at all." Zgomot's voice was dryer than a sandstorm in the Sahara. "We do keep an eye on them, but they're mostly so happy to stay alive that they show us whatever they can. We've learned a lot from them."

"Would you let one of them do anything really important?" Hasso asked.

Now the Lord of Bucovin hesitated. "Mm — maybe not," he said at last.

"Then maybe you understand, sir. King Bottero lets me do those things. You don't — you won't — you wouldn't."

"Suppose your other choice is the chopper?"

"Suppose it is." Hasso hoped he sounded more nonchalant and less frightened than he felt. "How do you trust anything you chop out of me?"

"Oh, we have ways." That wasn't the Lord of Bucovin. That was Rautat, the practical noncom. He sounded very sure of himself, and probably with good reason. Zgomot said something in Bucovinan. Rautat answered in the same language. Hasso didn't like it when people hashed out his fate in a tongue he couldn't understand. Who would have?

"Well, nothing is going to happen right away," Zgomot said, returning to Lenello. "Maybe we can show you you made a mistake taking service with Bottero. Or maybe, if we decide you're too dangerous to keep alive, we'll have to kill you to make sure you don't go back. We'll just have to see."

"Whatever you say, Lord." At least it's not the chopper right away!

"Whatever I say?" Zgomot's laugh was hardly more than a token effort. "Well, stranger, you've never ruled, have you?"

Prison. It was about the most Hasso could have expected, but it was nothing to get excited about. He had a room with a window much too narrow to give him any chance to escape through it. He had a cot and a slops bucket. The bucket did boast a cover. For such refinements he was grateful.

The door was too sturdy to break down. The bar was on the outside. Guards always stood in the corridor — he could hear them talking every now and again.

They fed him twice a day. The food wasn't especially good, but there was plenty of it. He didn't need to worry about going hungry. And, by the way soldiers with swords and bows glowered at him whenever the door opened to admit the servant with the tray, he didn't need to worry about escaping, either. He wasn't going anywhere till Zgomot decided to let him out.

He didn't have a torch or a lamp. When the sun went down — which it did very early at this time of year — he sat and lay in darkness till at last it rose again.

Grimly, he made the most of the few light hours. He did pushups and situps and other calisthenics. He ran in place. He paced around and around the cell, which was about three meters square. He'd got used to short days and long nights in Russia. This wasn't as bad as that. They didn't give him a brazier, but he had plenty of blankets. And it wasn't as cold here as it had been there — nowhere close.

After he'd been in there for eight days — he thought it was eight, but it could have been seven or nine — the door opened at an unexpected time. Ice ran through him. He knew enough about being a prisoner to suspect any change in routine. Was this the day when they'd sacrifice him to the great god Mumbo-Jumbo, er, Lavtrig?

In walked the usual guards with the usual cutlery. In with them walked someone else. She couldn't have been much more than a meter and a half tall; she didn't come up to the top of Hasso's shoulder. But she carried herself like a queen. No, more like a dancer, with a straight back and long, graceful strides that made her skirt swirl around her ankles as if she belonged to a flamenco troupe.

"You are the man from a far land who took service with Bottero," she said in a clear contralto. Her accent was much better than Hasso's. It might even have been better than Lord Zgomot's; she lacked the fussy precision that informed his speech.

"That's right." Hasso nodded. "Who are you?"

"My name is Drepteaza." She made four syllables of it. She waited. Hasso repeated the name. She corrected him. He tried again. She nodded. "That's close enough," she said. "I am here to teach you to talk like a human being." That was how it came out in Lenello.

In spite of everything, Hasso smiled. "What am I doing now?"

"Talking like a western wolf," Drepteaza answered seriously. The Bucovinans loved the Lenelli no more than the Lenelli cared for them. Up till now, Hasso hadn't had to worry about that, any more than he'd worried about what Jews felt about Germans. That would only have mattered to him if he'd got captured by a band of Jewish partisans. Now, in effect, he had been. And what the natives felt about the Lenelli and about one Hasso Pemsel could literally be a matter of life and death.

He bowed to Drepteaza. "I am at your service, my lady. You are a prettier teacher than Rautat would be, that's for sure." And so she was. She was probably somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, with strong cheekbones, fine dark eyes, and an elegant blade of a nose. He would have bet she had a nice shape under that baggy tunic and skirt, though maybe her elegant gait was what made him think so.

She looked at him with as much warmth as if he'd got poured out of the slops bucket. So much for flattery, Hasso thought. One of the guards turned out to understand Lenello. Hefting his sword, he growled, "Watch your mouth with the holy priestess."

"Sorry," Hasso said. Maybe ninety seconds after meeting a goddess, he'd started screwing her brains out. Plainly, the Bucovinans did things differently. Hasso bowed to Drepteaza again, this time in apology. He told her, "Sorry," too, and hoped she believed he was sincere.

"I suppose you meant no harm," she said, but Murmansk winter still chilled her voice. "To be sorry in our language is intristare!' She waited as she had before. He said the word. She corrected him. He tried again. The s was a long hiss, the r closer to a French than a German one, but not quite like that, either. She corrected him once more. At least she didn't expect him to get it right away. He gave it another try. She nodded, satisfied at last.

"How do you say, 'I am sorry'?" he asked.

She told him. Before he could try it, she added, "That is how a man says it. The form for a woman is — " Hasso winced, and hoped it didn't show. Somebody'd told him Polish had masculine and feminine verb forms. To him, that proved it wasn't a civilized language. Oh, well, he thought.

He repeated the masculine form, as well as he remembered it. This time, Drepteaza nodded right away. Hasso felt absurdly pleased with himself, as if he were a dog that had won a scrap of meat for a trick.

Then the guard said, "You better learn that one. You need it a lot, you — " He said something in Bucovinan that the priestess didn't translate. Hasso doubted it was an endearment.

She taught him a few more words. He asked, "May I have pen and parchment, please, to write them down?"

She raised a dark eyebrow. "The Lenelli taught you their letters?"

"Yes. But I have my own letters before. I probably use those. I am more used to them."

"Your own letters," Drepteaza murmured. "I had not thought of that. But you are supposed to know all sorts of curious things, aren't you? Yes, you may have parchment and pen and ink. I don't think you can use them to get away."

"Neither do I," Hasso said. "I wish I did."

The guard who spoke Lenello chuckled. Drepteaza didn't. She was a hard sell. But she did unbend enough to speak to the guards in Bucovinan. One of them touched a bent forefinger to his forehead. The salute wasn't in the least military, but was respectful. The guard hurried away.

He came back a few minutes later with writing supplies. Drepteaza taught Hasso their names in her language. He wrote them down. Drepteaza looked at the way he did it. "That is not Lenello," she said. "Is it your script?"

"Ja," he said absently, and then, "Yes."

"Is it easier to learn than Lenello?"

He had to think about that. "About the same, I suppose. Lenello has more characters, but that is good and bad. Each sound has its own characters with Lenello. With my writing, you need more than one letter for some sounds." He showed her some examples: sch and ei and ch. She caught on fast.

"Better to stick with Lenello writing," she said after some thought of her own. "Then we can still read what the blonds do."

"That make sense," Hasso agreed.

"Say the words you know. Write them, too," Drepteaza told him. She had to remind him of some he'd forgotten. He was just glad she didn't punish him for forgetting. She said, "Memorize what you know. I will come back. We will go on from there. Do we have a bargain?"

"Do I have a choice?" he asked.

As Rautat had, she said, "There is always a choice."

"Do I have a choice besides dying right away?"

"If you don't care to learn our tongue and show us some of what you know, Lord Zgomot will decide you're more trouble than you're worth. He'll probably kill you to make sure you don't go back to the Lenelli and their goddess." Was that scorn or fear in Drepteaza's voice, or maybe both at once? And did she know about him and Velona? He wouldn't have thought so… till this moment. She resumed: "He may just break your legs so you can't escape. Is that better or worse?"

"I don't know. It's pretty bad," Hasso said.

"Yes. Learn what I teach you, then. I'll see you later." Drepteaza left the cell. So did her guards.

She didn't say what she would do to him if he didn't learn, though that warning about Zgomot's wrath certainly gave him food for thought. But he wanted to have something to do in his cell besides calisthenics. He would have tried to learn even if she told him not to. He smiled crookedly to himself. He might have learned better had she told him not to.

She gave him a couple of days to digest what she'd taught. Or maybe, since she was a priestess, she had enough other things to do that she couldn't bother with him for a couple of days. That crooked smile came back. What is Hasso, that thou art mindful of him?

She returned not long after breakfast. A growling belly wouldn't distract him, anyhow. He bowed to her. "Good day," he said in the best Bucovinan he could command.

Drepteaza and the little swarthy soldiers with her all started to laugh. She corrected his pronunciation, explaining in Lenello, "When you say it the way you did, it means 'purple day.'"

"Oh." Hasso walked to the slit window and looked out. He couldn't see much, but what he could see wasn't purple. "No, I guess not."

A couple of the guards smiled, but Drepteaza was harder to amuse. "Say it the way it should be," she said in Lenello. Then she added something in Bucovinan. She returned to Lenello: "That means the same thing in my tongue. Listen." She repeated it. "You will hear it a lot, I think."

Are you just a cool customer or a cold fish? Hasso wondered. She seemed interested in Hasso Pemsel the curiosity, Hasso Pemsel the possible font of knowledge. Hasso Pemsel the man? She might have been dealing with a talking mule.

If she had been dealing with a talking mule, before long it would have been talking in Bucovinan. She knew how to teach. "Do you teach Lenelli to speak before?" he asked. He carefully didn't say other Lenelli. He wanted her to think of him as something different. Whether she would or not…

She nodded now. "Yes, I've done that," she answered. "We try to learn what we can from you invaders. The more we learn, the better our chances. King Bottero is not the first to try to invade us. He won't be the last."

That struck Hasso as likely, too. "If I learn good, do you let me out of this cell?"

"Lord Zgomot will decide that. I won't." Drepteaza showed that the Bucovinans knew how to pass the buck.

"If you ask him, will he listen? If you tell him I am safe, will he believe?" Hasso trotted out future tenses in Lenello. Sooner or later, he'd have to do it in Bucovinan.

"Are you safe? Should anybody believe that?" Drepteaza asked, and then went back to the language lesson.