Even in the dream, he saw he startled her. Would anybody from this world have been able to resist her when she did something like that? He wouldn’t have been surprised if the answer was no. But he wasn’t from here. He knew there was something to the goddess – he’d seen as much – but he didn’t automatically accept her as his deity.
After Velona’s amazement, anger came back. And it wasn’t just hers: it was also the goddess’. “Would you turn your face against me, Hasso Pemsel?” Velona asked, only something more rang in her voice.
“I don’t want to turn against anybody,” he said. “I just want people to leave me alone for a while.”
He might as well not have spoken. “You will pay,” Velona intoned – or rather, the goddess intoned through her. “You will pay, and Bucovin will pay for harboring you. Do you think you can thwart my will?”
“Well, the Bucovinans are still doing it,” Hasso said. If anyone had talked to Hitler that way after Operation Barbarossa failed, the Fuhrer would have handed him his head. But it might have done the Reich some good.
Velona didn’t want to listen, any more than Hitler would have. Hasso might have known – hell, he had known – she wouldn’t. People obviously weren’t in the habit of telling the goddess no. “Insolent mortal! If you would sooner live among swine than men, you deserve the choice you made.”
She hit him with something that made what Aderno and Velona did the last time seem a love tap by comparison. It wasn’t quite enough to do him in, though, because he woke up screaming again.
Drepteaza eyed Hasso, God only knew what in her eyes. “This could grow tedious,” she said in stern Lenello, and then yawned.
“I don’t like it any better than you do,” the Wehrmacht officer mumbled. “Less, I bet.”
He’d already summarized his latest encounter with Velona and Aderno. The Bucovinan priestess sighed. “Well, Leneshul can come back to your bed, if that makes you any happier. She may do you some good, anyhow.”
Hasso inclined his head. “I thank you,” he said in Bucovinan, thinking, I’d rather go to bed with you. Not for the first time, he wondered how smart – no, how dumb – he was. His goddess-filled lover had just tried to do him in twice, so now he wanted to sleep with a priestess instead. Maybe he ought to have his head examined to see if it held any working parts.
Drepteaza nodded absently. “I do this more for us than for you,” she said. “Whatever you know, the Lenelli don’t want you showing it to us. That seems plain enough, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose so.” Hasso figured that was part of it, too. But he would have bet marks against mud pies that Velona’s rage weighed more in the scales.
“But, of course, you don’t want to show it to us, either, whatever it is,” Drepteaza said. “You have sworn an oath to the people who want to kill you, and it counts for more than anything else.”
That was irony honed to a point sharp enough to slip between the ribs, pierce the heart, and leave behind hardly a drop of blood. Hasso’s ears heated. “I try to be loyal,” he said.
“Loyalty is a wonderful thing. It is also a road people travel in both directions – or it should be,” Drepteaza said. “If you are loyal and your lord is not…”
What had Bottero promised when Hasso swore homage to him? He’d vowed he would do nothing that made him not deserve it. Had he kept his half of the oath? When you got right down to it, no.
He’s forsworn, all right. I can do whatever I want, and do it with a clear conscience.
The thought made Hasso no happier. He didn’t want to take service with the Grenye, to pledge allegiance to Lord Zgomot of Bucovin. It reminded him too much of Wehrmacht men joining the Red Army and going to war against their old comrades. Some few had done it, he knew. And great swarms of Russians fought for the swastika and against the hammer and sickle.
Yes, they did. And Hasso knew what he thought of them. “You can use a turncoat,” he said miserably. “You can use him, but you can never like him or trust him or respect him.”
“You do have honor.” Drepteaza sounded surprised when she said it. Somehow, that seemed the most unkindest cut of all. After a moment, she went on, “Tell me this, Hasso Pemsel: do the Lenelli like you or trust you or respect you?”
“They … did.” Hasso made himself pause and use the past tense. The present wasn’t true, however much he wished it were.
“They did, yes, when you were useful to them. Then they threw you away like a bone with the meat gnawed off it,” Drepteaza said. “So why hold back now? Don’t you want your revenge? Don’t you deserve it?”
Hasso didn’t answer right away. He had to look inside himself to find where the truth lay. When he did, it only made him even more uneasy, and here he hadn’t thought he could be. Joining Bucovin, joining the Grenye, wasn’t like going over to the Slavic Untermenschen. No, it was worse than that. Every time he looked at them, he thought of Jews, a whole great country full of grasping, swarthy Jews.
And he slept with Leneshul. And he wanted to sleep with Drepteaza. But that was his sport. Helping this folk against the Aryan-seeming warriors from across the sea…
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “I just don’t know.”
“Well, you had better make up your mind, Hasso Pemsel.” Drepteaza didn’t know what was bothering him. He didn’t think he could explain it, either, not so it made sense to her. “You’d better make up your mind,” she repeated. “And you’d better hurry up about it, too. You don’t have much time left.” And away she went, taking with her the captor’s privilege of the last word.
Somebody pounded on Hasso’s door, much too early in the morning. Next to the Wehrmacht officer, Leneshul groaned. “Who’s that?” she muttered. “Why doesn’t he go away?”
“Shall I find out?” Hasso asked. Leneshul only shrugged and pulled the blankets over her head, not that that did any good against the racket. Whoever was out there was bound and determined to come in.
Yawning and cursing in German, Hasso pulled on his trousers and walked to the door. He threw it open, then stopped in surprise. That wasn’t a dark little Bucovinan out there, but a blond taller than himself. And, he realized a heartbeat later, someone he knew, too.
“Scanno!” he exclaimed. “What the demon are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question, buddy,” the Lenello from Drammen answered. “They wanted me to come here and talk some sense into your pointed head, that’s why I’m here. Nechemat’s cursed glad to get away from all the Lenelli, too.”
Nechemat, Hasso gathered, was Scanno’s Grenye wife or lover. The German had seen her but never met her. “But you’re a Lenello,” he pointed out.
“On the outside, sure.” Scanno breathed beer fumes into Hasso’s face. Whether in Drammen or Falticeni, he liked to drink. He liked to talk, too. “I don’t act like those dumb buggers, though. You think Grenye aren’t people just on account of they’re mindblind? Shit, I’m mindblind. Most Lenelli are. What’s the big deal?” He eyed Hasso with more shrewdness than the Wehrmacht officer would have thought he owned. “I hear you’re not. That could be a big deal. And you know other stuff, whatever the demon it is. So could that.”
“They tell you everything?” Hasso asked. “Back in Drammen, they tell you everything?”
“All kinds of crap goes on under Bottero’s big, pointy beak,” said Scanno, who had a big, pointy beak himself. “A little harder to slip away than it used to be – I bet that’s your fault, huh?”
“I suppose so.” Hasso hadn’t had time to do a really good job of training the Lenelli in security and counterespionage. If the likes of Scanno could beat his setup … He knew what that meant. Bottero’s men hadn’t had time to figure it all out and make it their own yet. They were doing it because he’d told them to, not because they saw all the benefits and ins and outs for themselves. Hasso made himself ask, “How is the king?”
Scanno laughed, a big, booming laugh that made the Bucovinan guards stare. “Well, it’s not like he invites me to the palace for roast duck and wine with sugar in it,” the Lenello renegade said. “If he knows who I am at all, he figures I’m that drunken stumblebum who’d sooner slum it with the Grenye than stick to my own kind. And he’s right, too.”
He said that even as the same thought formed in Hasso’s mind. If Scanno could see himself so clearly, the rest of what he said carried more weight.
“But anyway, Bottero’s not happy right now. I don’t need to eat his duck and drink his sugarwine to know that,” Scanno went on. “Any time one of the kings loses to Bucovin, he’s ready to spit nails. It’s embarrassing, that’s what it is. And he’s got to worry that his loving neighbors will jump on his back. He took a real licking this time. You took a licking. What’s this strike column I heard about?” Briefly, Hasso explained. Scanno grunted. “That’s pretty sly, all right. But it didn’t work this time.”
“No, it didn’t,” Hasso agreed. “So why do you throw in with the Grenye and not your own folk?”
“I like ‘em better,” Scanno answered. “I mean, pussy’s pussy – who cares if the hair on it’s yellow or brown? And the Grenye, they don’t brag and strut and carry on all the stinking time. They’re people you can get along with. Besides, isn’t it about time somebody gave the poor sorry cocksuckers a fair shake?”
Scanno bragged and strutted and carried on as much as any Lenello Hasso had ever known. Maybe he didn’t know himself so well as the German had thought he did. Or maybe his size and his noise – and his yellow hair – made him stand out more among the natives than he ever would among his own people. Maybe he liked that. If he did, well, so what? What did it mean? That he was human. Who wasn’t?
But that question had another answer, one it wouldn’t have had in Hasso’s old world. Scanno, plainly, had never gone to bed with Velona or anybody like her. True, the difference wasn’t that she was a blonde, not a brunette. The difference was the goddess.
Yes, and the other difference is that she wants you dead now, Hasso reminded himself. Details, details.
“Here – I’ve got another question for you,” Scanno said. “Were you at that place called – what the demon was the name of it? Muresh, that was it. The one where Bottero’s boys went hog wild?”
“Yes, I was there.”
“Did you play their games?”
“No.” Hasso didn’t say he’d seen such things before in Russia. He’d played those games then – the Ivans were enemies he hated, unlike the Bucovinans, who were foes merely in a professional sense. And the Russians had taken their revenge once the Red Army crossed the Reich’s borders. Oh, hadn’t they just?