“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.