After the downfall

VI

Hasso used coins on a tabletop to show King Bottero what he had in mind. He didn't do much talking. He didn't have to; Orosei, Nornat, and Sanfrat did it for him. They were more enthusiastic about his idea than he was, seeming filled with converts' zeal.

Marshal Lugo stood by Bottero, listening to the cavalry officers bragging about what they'd do to Bucovin if the king turned them loose to fight the way they wanted to. The marshal looked like a man who'd just taken a big bite out of a horse-manure sandwich.

"You can do this?" Bottero asked when the officers finished their excited exposition.

"Yes, your Majesty!" Nornat and Sanfrat chorused. Carsoli wasn't there. Maybe he'd go along if the king ordered it, but he was no convert.

King Bottero turned to Orosei. "What do you think?"

"It's something we haven't tried before, anyhow," the master-at-arms answered. "What we have tried against Bucovin hasn't worked real well, so why not trot out something different for a change?"

"We can use this against Lenelli, too," Nornat said. "Once the lancers break the enemy line, it's like breaking a turtle's shell. What's inside is meat. Our meat."

"Mm." The king plucked at his beard. "How about you, Lugo? You haven't had much to say."

"Everything sounds wonderful when you're drinking beer," the marshal said. "How well it'll work when we really try it out… That's liable to be a different story, and not such a pretty one."

The crack held just enough truth to sting. Hasso gnawed on his lower lip. Perhaps noticing him look unhappy, Bottero asked, "What do you have to say to that, outlander?"

"Nothing is perfect, your Majesty. Some things is — uh, are — better, some worse," Hasso said. "How good is what you do now? Bucovin is still here, so maybe not so good. Maybe try something different, something new."

"A good answer," King Bottero replied.

"No, not so good!" Lugo cried. "The foreigner will risk our men, risk good Lenelli. But where will he be? Someplace safe, that's where. Someplace where he doesn't need to take chances."

"I am no lancer," Hasso said. The marshal sneered. Hasso held up a hand. "Not done yet. I am no lancer, but I ride at the front, when the column charges." He bowed to Lugo and clicked his heels. The Lenelli didn't do that, but they recognized the formality of the gesture. "I ride there, yes. You ride beside me?"

Nornat and Sanfrat sucked in their breath together. Orosei chuckled and then politely tried to pretend he hadn't. I'll put my money where my mouth is, Hasso might have said. Have you got the balls to ride along?

Lugo looked as if he hated him. He likely did. But he was ruined if he looked like a coward in front of his sovereign. "If the king orders this foolish scheme to go forward, you will not see me hang back," he said. "No miserable outlander will ever say he dares to go where a Lenello dares not come with him."

"Good." Hasso ignored the insult. "We ride together. Together, we crush the Grenye. Nothing else matters. You do not have to love me, Marshal. You only have to want to win. That is all I want."

"Ha!" Lugo said. "You want to make a big name for yourself, to show everyone how smart you are. Be careful you don't outsmart yourself."

He wasn't wrong there, either, no matter how little Hasso felt like admitting it. The German only shrugged. "What can I do? Where can I go? This is my land now. I want to see King Bottero win. If the king wins, I win. If the king loses, I lose. Better for everyone if the king wins."

That last should have been a subjunctive. Hasso realized as much after the easier, more common indicative came out of his mouth. The grammatical error wasn't all bad, though. It made King Bottero's triumph sound more nearly inevitable, less doubtful, than the subjunctive, a mood made for showing uncertainty, ever could have.

Orosei winked at him. Maybe the master-at-arms thought he'd made the mistake on purpose. Or maybe Orosei thought he'd said the right thing, even if his grammar was bad. He could hope so, anyhow.

By the way Bottero's eyes lit up, Hasso had said the right thing. "I am going to win," the king boomed. "The kingdom is going to win. We will drive the Grenye before us like chaff on the breeze." But that seemed to remind him of something else. "You got silly about some Grenye wench not long ago, didn't you, Hasso Pemsel?"

Except for Velona, the Lenelli mostly used his full name when they weren't happy with him, the way a parent might have. Hearing it used that way put his back up. "Silly? I don't think so, your Majesty. Does Aderno treat a horse or a dog bad on purpose? Not likely. Why treat a Grenye bad on purpose, then? Just make trouble with no need. Plenty of trouble already, yes? Why make more if you don't have to?"

"This will help our folk," Bottero said in that-settles-it tones.

Marshal Lugo was no fool — or, at least, was not the kind of fool who made a bad courtier. "Yes, your Majesty," he intoned. If his tone suggested he would sooner go on the rack than do anything Hasso proposed… well, how could you prove that? You couldn't, and Hasso knew it too bloody well.

If King Bottero found anything wrong with the way his marshal agreed, he didn't let on. He made a fist and slammed it into his other hand. "We march against Bucovin," he declared, and that was that. The Fuhrer could have been no more decisive.

As Bottero's realm readied itself for war, Hasso found himself wondering whether the king might not be too decisive. It struck him as late in the year to start a major campaign. Germany had moved against the Ivans on 22 June after delaying six weeks to squash Yugoslavia and Greece. That delay probably kept the Wehrmacht from taking Moscow. And 22 June was right at the summer solstice. They were well past it here; Hasso grimaced when he remembered how they'd celebrated it.

So much he didn't know about the way things worked here. How big exactly was Bucovin? Bottero's maps had no reliable scale of distances. And how bad were the local winters? Hasso had no idea. He'd never been through one.

He could find out. Velona's eyes got wide when he asked whether rivers or lakes froze over. "No," she said. "Farther north, maybe, but not around here. Do they do that where you come from?"

"Sometimes." Too damned often, in Russia, Hasso thought. Then he asked, "Does it snow here?" Only trouble was, he didn't know how to say snow in Lenello. The question came out as, "Does ice fall from the sky?" He used fluttering fingers to show snowflakes dancing on the breeze.

Velona laughed after she understood what he meant. "Oh, yes," she said, and taught him the words he needed to ask the question the right way. She kissed him when he showed he remembered them and could pronounce them. If he'd got rewards like that in school, he figured he would have grown up to be a genius.

"How often does it snow in the winter?" he asked.

"Sometimes," Velona said with an enchanting shrug. Don't get too distracted, Hasso reminded himself. She went on, "It snows every winter — sometimes more, sometimes less."

"You make war in the wintertime?" Hasso persisted.

"Not so much as in the summer, but we do," Velona answered. "We aren't peasants, the way the Grenye are. Fighting in the winter is harder for them. It takes them away from their farms."

Maybe there was method in Bottero's madness after all, then. Hasso could hope so, anyhow. "Your harvests the past few years are good?" he asked.

"Good enough." Velona started laughing again, this time at him. "Good heavens, darling, are you going to count every ear of wheat in the granary and every arrow in every horse-archer's quiver?"

"Someone should," Hasso said stubbornly. Man for man, panzer for panzer, the Wehrmacht was better than the Red Army. Everybody knew that, even the Ivans. But when they could mass five times the men, eight times the panzers, twenty times the guns, quantity took on a quality of its own. Bucovin wouldn't have that big an edge — or he hoped it wouldn't. Even so… "Lots of Grenye."

"Too many. That's why we're going to war." It all seemed simple to Velona. "The goddess wants us to rule them."

"She tells you that?" In Hasso's world, the question would have floated on a sea of sarcasm. Not here. He'd seen enough to make him shove sarcasm aside. If Velona told him the goddess possessed her now and then, he couldn't very well argue. He had no better name for what happened.

Velona nodded now. "She wouldn't have led us here if she didn't."

God wills it! The Spaniards had believed the same thing, and conquered most of two continents before they paused to wonder. And the Lenelli had a lot more evidence going for them than the Spaniards ever had. "The goddess says Bottero beats Bucovin this time?" By now, Hasso recognized the future and the various past tenses when he heard them. Before long, he would have to start using them himself. People understood him when he stayed in the present, but he was starting to sound stupid in his own ears.

"She hasn't said one way or the other," Velona answered. "But why would she let us go forward if something bad would happen when we did?"

One more question Hasso couldn't answer. Not having been devout back in Germany put him at a disadvantage here. You could argue about religion in the world he came from. Not in this one, not the same way. Spiritual things were as real here as Wednesday or a poke in the eye.

In his own world, he would have asked if the ambassador from Bucovin had been sent packing. Things worked the same here… to a point. The Lenello kingdoms exchanged envoys among themselves, and gave them safe-conduct home when they went to war. But no Lenello kingdom exchanged ambassadors with Bucovin. Recognizing the Grenye as equals would have been beneath the Lenelli's dignity. They talked with Bucovin when they had to, but always unofficially, so they could pretend to themselves that it didn't really count.

He found a different question instead: "Is the eastern border sealed?"

Velona looked blank. "What do you mean?"

Hasso wanted to bang his head against the stone outwall of Castle Drammen. Being security minister in a kingdom that didn't know anything about security gave him unending frustration. Things he took for granted had never yet crossed the Lenelli's minds. As patiently as he could, he explained: "Grenye go out of Drammen. They go out of Bottero's kingdom. They go into Bucovin. They tell the Grenye what the king does. If we seal the border, they can't cross and tell."

"That wouldn't be easy," Velona said with a frown.

"No, not easy," Hasso agreed. "But worth trying, yes? Stop some of them from going to Bucovin, Grenye there know less. The more we stop, the less Bucovin finds out." I hope.

Velona couldn't issue the orders. Neither could Hasso, not by himself. The Lenelli who knew him personally took him seriously. To the ones who didn't, he would never be anything but a jumped-up outlander. So he took the idea to King Bottero. The King got it faster than Velona had. When he did, he kissed Hasso on both cheeks. He'd been eating onions, so Hasso appreciated the sentiment more than the kisses themselves.

"Who would have imagined such a thing?" Bottero boomed after releasing Hasso from his embrace. "The goddess knew what she was doing when she sent you to us, all right."

To Hasso's way of thinking, anyone who didn't take those elementary precautions was asking to have his head handed to him. Were his own fourteenth-century ancestors this naive? If they were, it was a miracle any of them lived long enough to reproduce. Of course, the soldiers on both sides must have been equally inept, or somebody would have wiped the floor with somebody else.

"I'll send the order out to the east by sorcery, so we don't waste any more time," Bottero said — yes, he did get it.

"Not just to the east. To the north and south and west, too," Hasso said. "Seal the whole border." Now the king looked blank. "Grenye can go up or down to another Lenello kingdom, one without a closed border. Then they go to Bucovin," Hasso pointed out.

That got him kissed again. "You are as slippery as a slug, as sneaky as a serpent!" Bottero said. Hasso supposed those were compliments. The king went on, "I never would have thought of that — never, I tell you!"

Suppose Heinrich Himmler came from the Philippine Islands. That would probably make him more valuable to the Fuhrer, not less. He would still make a dandy security chief. But, as a manifest foreigner, he could never think of grabbing the topmost job for himself.

In Bottero's kingdom, Hasso was far more foreign than a Filipino in Berlin. Another country? He was from another world! He would never be king, not even with the goddess at his side and at his back. Security minister and technical adviser was as high as he could rise. He had the post. Now he needed to deliver the goods.

"Can magic help to find Grenye who want to go east?" he asked. "Grenye who go through the swamp, say, not by the built-up road?"

"Grenye who sneak through the swamp." Bottero tiptoed with his fingers on a tabletop to show what sneak meant. Hasso nodded his thanks; that was a useful verb for a security man to know. The king went on, "I'm no wizard myself, so I can't really tell you. Aderno could."

"Aderno and I, we are not happy with each other." Sometimes Hasso came out with phrases he'd read. They often made people smile. In Lenello as in German, the written language wasn't just the same as the spoken one.

Bottero smiled now… for a moment. Then he looked severe — and a man as large and tough as he was could look very severe indeed. "You serve the kingdom. You serve it well. Aderno was doing the same thing with that Grenye wench."

"Aderno serves Aderno with that Grenye wench," Hasso said stubbornly. "Aderno likes to hurt people. Fight with Grenye gives him a reason." He shook his head. That wasn't the word he wanted. "Gives him an excuse." That was what he wanted to say.

"He serves the kingdom." Bottero couldn't see anything else.

Hasso shrugged, seeing no point in arguing with his sovereign. National Socialist doctrine shouted that that psychiatrist in Vienna was nothing but a crazy damn Jew. All the same, Hasso would have bet Deutschmarks against dung that Aderno had a big old bulge in his pants when he dragged Zadar off to what might literally have been a fate worse than death.

"You serve the kingdom, too," Bottero reminded him. "You and Aderno both serve the same goal. So you should get along with each other."

That was logical. As far as Hasso was concerned, it was also next to impossible. "I would rather kill him than get along with him… your Majesty," he said.

The king stared at him. At first, Hasso thought he'd badly offended Bottero. Then he realized Bottero was fighting hard not to laugh. The king lost the fight. "You fell from beyond the moon," he said between snorts. Hasso nodded. That wasn't so very different from his own thought of a little while before. Bottero went on, "You fell all that way — and you're just as touchy and proud as a Lenello born a short spit from my palace."

Hasso clicked his heels, which showed once more how foreign he was. But his words said the opposite: "I am a man, your Majesty."

"Well, Velona told me the same thing," Bottero said.

"What? That she is a man? Don't believe her."

Bottero snorted again. "If she told me that, I wouldn't believe her. I know better, and so do you." He grimaced; he must have remembered that his sharing Velona didn't make Hasso happy. Before the German could say anything, Bottero continued, "No, she told me you were a man, and it's so. And you're a man I need. That's so, too."

"And Aderno?" Hasso asked.

"Is also a man I need," the king said. "Don't try to kill him unless you really have to. If you do try, you may find that wizards take a deal of killing, and sometimes they aren't dead even after they die."

Thinking fondly of his Schmeisser, Hasso said, "I take the chance."

Detachments from west of Drammen, and from north and south, flowed into the capital, some by river, others by road. Soldiers camped inside Castle Drammen, and on the wide grounds of the Lenello estates around it. They swarmed into the Grenye districts closer to the walls. When they came back, most of them were drunk. Some had unfortunate diseases. Several got their belt pouches slit.

A couple of them got their throats slit instead. Several Grenye also ended up dead, some in fair fights, others, by all appearances, slaughtered for the sport of it. Hasso had seen that the Grenye districts had plenty of brothels. Not all the Lenelli bothered going to them. If some warriors saw a short, dark woman whose looks they liked, they went and took her. If she wasn't a whore, she was only a Grenye.

How many times had Hasso heard that phrase since coming here? More often than he wanted to: he knew that. He didn't bother taking his worries to Bottero; the king wouldn't do anything about it. Instead, he talked to Velona, asking, "Does the goddess like what the soldiers do to women who don't want it or deserve it?"

"They're soldiers," she answered with a shrug. "They act that way because that's how soldiers act. What can you do about it?"

"Me?" With a sour laugh, Hasso jabbed a thumb at his own chest. "I can't do anything. I am only a man, and only a foreigner at that."

"Not only a man. Quite a man," Velona purred.

"I thank you." Hasso hoped she'd talked to Bottero that way. He tried not to let her distract him now. It wasn't easy, but he managed. 'I can't do anything, no. But can you? You are the goddess. Does the goddess care for women, or not?"

"Of course she does." Velona paused. "I am not the goddess. Sometimes the goddess is me. It's not the same thing." Now Hasso shrugged. It came close enough for him. He knew he would never understand the difference, not unless or until a god possessed him. He didn't think that was likely. It might not be impossible here, but even so… Velona went on, "If she wants me to do anything about those Grenye sluts, I'm sure she'll tell me about it."

Some of them weren't sluts. That was the point Hasso kept trying to make, the point none of the Lenelli wanted to see. Instead of banging away at it, he tried a different tack: "Next time she is in you, maybe you should ask her. Maybe she needs a question to think about it."

"Maybe I will." Velona sounded more as if she was humoring him than as if she really intended to do it, but he couldn't do anything about that. He'd done what he could do. If it wasn't enough… Well, when had the Grenye ever caught anything close to an even break? If they didn't catch one now, it wouldn't change the way the world worked very much.

When enough of his soldiers came into Drammen to satisfy him, King Bottero started east, toward the border with Bucovin. Hasso gathered that some units were late, and that the king wasn't about to wait for them. That made sense to the German. Despite his own best efforts, surprise was bound to be gone. All the same, you didn't want to waste time on campaign and let the enemy get ready for you. The Wehrmacht waited around at Kursk, and how the Ivans made them pay! Fewer men on time were often better than plenty a few days too late.

Plenty of men on time were better still, but Hasso had realized he couldn't expect too much from the Lenelli. They knew nothing about Germanic efficiency. He hoped to teach them, but Rome wasn't built in a day.

Everything pointed to their being more efficient than the Grenye, and not just because of magic. That would probably do. When civilized soldiers attacked barbarians, the barbarians usually lost. That was how civilization advanced.

Hasso thought of Arminius. He thought of three Roman legions cut to pieces in the Teutoberg Wald. Germany stayed outside the Roman Empire because the barbarians won that time. What would his world look like if they'd lost? Nobody would ever know now.

He'd watched and ridden along when the Wehrmacht roared into Poland, into France, into Russia. Because he'd done all that, watching and riding along when the Lenelli moved out of Drammen impressed him less than it might have. It felt more like a scene from a historical movie with plenty of extras than the start of a real campaign.

The stinks of sweat and horse manure said it was real enough. Foot soldiers trudged along in loose order, shields and quivers on their backs, unstrung bows in their right hands, shortswords on their hips. Almost all of them wore iron helms. A few had mailshirts. The ones who did wore surcoats to keep the sun from cooking them in their own juice.

Teamsters kept wagons rolling. Ungreased axles screeched. Horses and mules strained in the traces. Choking clouds of dust rose. Hasso knew all about unpaved roads — one more thing the Russians had taught him. He hoped it wouldn't rain. This particular unpaved road would turn to rutted mud, and then to glue.

Barges and boats came up the Drammion alongside the marching men and noisy wagons. Moving bulky supplies by water was easier, cheaper, and faster than it was by land. When the river turned to marsh, as it would, the Lenelli would have to unload the vessels. In the meantime, they took advantage of them.

Companies of mounted archers and lancers rode along as if everything depended on them alone. In a way, the armored men were right. They were the strike force, the spearpoint, of Bottero's army. They could crack the enemy line, the way panzers could in the other world. But if the archers ran out of arrows, if the lancers were reduced to scattering over the countryside to scrounge for food, they wouldn't be able to fight the way they should. The Lenelli understood that… up to a point.

Bottero's army had one accompaniment the Wehrmacht wouldn't have: Aderno and six or eight other wizards on unicornback. Hasso would have preferred Stukas and Messerschmitts overhead, or even a hot-air or hydrogen-filled observation balloon. He knew he would never get the airplanes; they were much too far over the technological horizon. A balloon might be possible… one of these years.

His own horse was a good, steady gelding. He could hope it wouldn't go mad with fear when he started shooting from its back. He did envy the wizards the elegance and beauty of their mounts. He also envied them the unicorns' horns, some silvered like Aderno's, others gilded. Not only were they splendid; they looked to be formidable in battle, too.

"A pity lancers and archers don't ride unicorns," he said when they stopped for supper the first evening out of Drammen.

Aderno looked through him. Since they almost came to blows over the Grenye serving woman, the wizard barely bothered staying polite. "For one thing, unicorns are rare, and so deserving to carry on their backs men with rare talent," he said. "For another, they will not suffer men without sorcerous talent to mount them. Anyone but an ignorant newcomer would know as much."

It wasn't quite, Screw you, stupid, but it came close enough. "I bet I can ride one," Hasso said.

The rest of the wizards laughed till they had to hold their sides. "You want to be thrown and stomped and gored, don't you?" said one of them, a beanpole of a man named Flegrei.

"No. I want to ride a unicorn." Hasso reached into a pocket — he was wearing his Wehrmacht trousers, which boasted such refinements — and pulled out a goldpiece. "This says I can do it."

"You're on!" Flegrei shouted, and showed off his own shiny coin.

All the wizards except Aderno clamored to bet Hasso. He had to check whether he had enough money with him to cover them. As it turned out, he did. He thought they really wanted not just his gold but to watch him get thrown and stomped and gored. Since he figured Aderno had more reason to want that than any of the others, he asked, "You, too?"

Aderno bit his lip. Yes, he wanted to watch the foreigner fail, too. He just wasn't so sure as the rest of the wizards that Hasso would. In the end, though, he nodded. "Yes, me, too. Why not?"

Hasso turned out not to have one more coin. "If the unicorn kills me, tell Velona I say she should pay you," he said. Aderno nodded. Hasso bowed to the other wizards. "Whose unicorn do I ride?"

"You mean, whose unicorn don't you ride?" Flegrei jeered. "You can try with mine. Once you get what you deserve, maybe you won't strut so tall."

That gibe stung. Hasso didn't like being short among the Lenelli. He briefly wondered how the Grenye, most of whom were much shorter than he was, enjoyed looking up to the big blond men from out of the west. But then the Grenye slipped from his mind. He bowed again. "Shorten the stirrup leathers, please," he told Flegrei, whose legs were much longer than his.

Flegrei's answering bow was scorn personified. "At your service, my prickly little hedgehog," he said. Hasso watched him closely as he adjusted them, but he did an honest job of it. That had to mean he really didn't believe Hasso could stay on the unicorn. When Flegrei finished, he stepped away from the beautiful snowy beast. "All yours."

"Danke schon" Hasso forgot Lenello for the moment. He walked up to the unicorn. It looked at him sidelong out of an eye as blue as Velona's. A low snort, more curious than anything else — he hoped — came from it. The wizards murmured among themselves. Maybe they'd expected the unicorn to run him through with its horn as soon as he got anywhere near it.

Before he could think about what he was doing, he swung up into the saddle. The unicorn snorted again, this time sounding distinctly surprised. It started to buck.

"Cut that out," he said, and went to work calming it as he would have with a restive horse. And the unicorn, sensing that the new rider, though a stranger, had some notion of what he was doing up there, did calm down. He rode it in a slow circle around the staring wizards and halted directly in front of Flegrei.

Dismounting, he bowed yet again and held out his hand. "Nice animal. Now pay up, you cocksure bastard."

Goggling, Flegrei paid. "How did you do that?" he choked out.

"Easy." Hasso jabbed a thumb at his own chest. "I'm magic. You're smart, you stop screwing with me." He went around to the other wizards, collecting a goldpiece from each of them. He saved Aderno for last. "You, too."

"Here." Aderno gave him the coin. "You are magical, or you can be. If you saw the gold star, you certainly can be. But I didn't think potential would satisfy a unicorn — which shows I don't know as much as I wish I did. There is more to you than meets the eye, Hasso Pemsel. How much more keeps surprising me, and not always happily."

Back in Germany, Hasso thought, I'd have to be a virgin to ride a unicorn. But there were no unicorns in Germany. And, with the Russians rampaging through the country all hot with vengeance, there probably weren't a hell of a lot of virgins left there, either.

The wizards squabbled furiously. "He saw gold?" Flegrei shouted at Aderno. "Why the demon didn't you say so? You would have saved us all some money!"

"You would have saved us from looking like idiots, too," another sorcerer said.

"Nothing could save some people from looking like idiots." Aderno could be bitchy.

"You must be one of them," the other wizard retorted. "If he saw gold and you bet against him, you deserved to lose, by the goddess."

"It's not just the talent — it's the training. Or I thought it was," Aderno said. "But it seems I was wrong."

"Yes, it seems you were." Flegrei sounded disgusted. "And it cost all of us gold, and now the goddess-cursed foreigner will be more puffed up than ever."

Hasso felt like making his chest swell up and strutting around like a pouter pigeon. He decided not to, though; Flegrei was already angry enough at him. And Aderno said, "Watch your mouth, you blockhead! Whatever the foreigner is, he's not goddess-cursed. Velona will put your ears on a necklace if she hears you go around saying he is."

"Ha! I'm not afraid of her," Flegrei declared.

"Well, if that doesn't prove you're a blockhead, I don't know what would," Aderno said. By the way the rest of the wizards stepped back from Flegrei, they agreed with Aderno. That was one more sign of the power of the woman Hasso had taken up with — or rather, the woman who'd taken up with him.

As for his own power… Security minister wasn't bad. De facto General Staff officer wasn't bad, either. And showing up a bunch of haughty wizards, and making money while he did it, was a hell of a lot better than not bad.

Coming back to Castle Svarag wasn't quite like coming home for Hasso. He wondered if he would ever feel at home anywhere here. He doubted it. Giving up the sense of home was the emigre's curse. But he'd spent some time at Mertois' castle, and he'd got to know a good many of the castellan's soldiers. He felt less not at home here than he did most other places in this world. The convoluted thought made one corner of his mouth quirk up in ironic amusement.

"Good to see you, little man. Good to see you," Sholseth boomed. The clout on the back he gave Hasso almost knocked him over. "I hear you and Orosei couldn't take each other out."

"After a while, we stop trying," Hasso answered. "We decide, why bother? One of us could get hurt bad."

Sholseth nodded. "Makes sense. I tell you, I felt better when I heard Orosei didn't beat you. He's as good as we've got. I know I can't take him, even though I'm bigger. So if you're as good as he is, no wonder you knocked me for a loop."

"Maybe I'm just lucky," Hasso said.

"Nah." Sholseth shook his head. "You're good. When you threw me over your shoulder, I thought, What the demon am I getting into? Then I went wham, and I pretty much stopped thinking after that." He thumped Hasso again, still good-naturedly. He seemed to take a perverse pride in being the first Lenello to discover what a formidable fellow this foreigner could be.

Hasso was glad enough to drink and talk with his old acquaintances. But he also found he had serious business at Castle Svarag. Mertois was keeping close to a dozen Grenye who'd got caught slipping east toward Bucovin in his dungeon. Hasso had them brought out one at a time. "If you lie to me, you be sorry," he told the first one, a stocky man named Magar. He nodded to Aderno. "And the wizard, he knows if you lie."

"I didn't do anything," Magar said stolidly.

"No one ever does anything," Hasso answered with a weary sigh. "Everyone is always so innocent, it makes you cry. Why you run off to Bucovin?"

"I wasn't going to Bucovin," Magar said. "I had a fight with my woman. I was going away when these Lenelli on horseback grabbed me and hauled me back here."

"Well?" Hasso asked Aderno.

The wizard used the little truth spell Hasso had seen before. Then he frowned. "I'm not sure. It doesn't say yes or no." His head came up and his nostrils twitched; he might have been a hunting hound taking a scent. "This reminds me of how that goddess-cursed Scanno masked his taste for Grenye-loving."

"Does it?" Hasso eyed Magar. "Where do we go now?"

"Where else? The torturers. They'll pull the truth out of him," Aderno answered.

Magar let out a horrified yowl. "I didn't do anything!" he wailed when he found words. "Don't hurt me! I didn't do anything!"

Aderno waited to see what Hasso did next. If Hasso didn't go along, the wizard would suspect him of liking the Grenye too well. But that wasn't what decided him. Bucovin was the enemy. If Magar worked for the Grenye there, he would know useful things, things King Bottero needed to find out. "Yes, we give him to them," Hasso said. Magar howled again. Ignoring him, Hasso went on, "They need to go after truth, not to hurt for the fun of hurting. They know the difference?"

"They know," Aderno assured him. He couldn't help adding, "I wasn't sure you did."

"Oh, yes," Hasso said. Like any army, the Wehrmacht squeezed enemy prisoners when it had to. So did the Waffen-SS, often more enthusiastically. "Sometimes prisoners say anything just to stop hurting," he warned. "Have to be careful, keep him away from others, weigh what he says, what they say." He used his hands as a set of scales coming into balance.

"Yes." Aderno nodded. "You do know something about this business. I wondered how soft you were."

"Because sometimes I think you are a jackass, that makes me soft?" Hasso asked. Aderno blinked. Hasso went on, "I know sometimes you think I am a jackass, too. I do not think that makes you soft." He jerked a thumb at Magar. "Have them work on him where the ones we question can hear him yell. When they hear that, they want to tell us everything we need to know, yes?"

Magar quailed from the wizard's smile. Hasso didn't blame him; he would have quailed, too, were those teeth and that twist of lip aimed his way. "A good thought, outlander. Yes, a very good thought."

Sure enough, the Grenye's shrieks pierced the interrogation chamber like so many spearthrusts. The other little dark men quivered whenever a new one rang out. Hasso let a couple of them go free after Aderno's magic showed they really were hunting or fishing when the Lenelli scooped them up. "If you are not King Bottero's enemy, I am not your enemy," he told them. "But if you are the king's enemy, my job is to make you sorry. I do — I will do — my job."

The ones he turned loose blubbered their thanks. Some of the ones he didn't turn loose went on claiming they had nothing to do with anything. Aderno's spell didn't always prove they were lying. It didn't exonerate them, either. It did… nothing. The ambiguity, the blankness, were plenty to make Hasso and Aderno suspicious. Those Grenye went to the torturer, too.

One peasant sang like a goldfinch. His name was Lupul, and he admitted everything as soon as he heard another Grenye yell in torment. Hasso could almost watch his ballocks crawl up into his belly. "Yes, I wanted to tell Bucovin what you were doing," he gabbled. "Why not? My people rule Bucovin. You blond robbers don't."

"We will," Aderno said. He turned to Hasso. "Now what do we do with him?"

"He should have a quick end, anyway," Hasso said. "Give him to the headsman." Lupul wailed. Hasso felt like wailing himself, though he didn't show it. If the Grenye were still clan against clan, tribe against tribe, beating them in detail would be easier. If they saw the struggle as all of them against the Lenelli… well, it sure didn't help.