She used gestures to show him Drammen was big, and opened and closed her hand many times to show him it was populous. “How many people?” he asked. When they stopped, he drew in the dirt with a stick to show her he understood the idea of written numbers. To show one was easy. Five and ten weren’t hard, and fifty and a hundred just took patience.
Velona got excited when she saw what he was doing. She called Aderno over. The wizard was chewing on something; the peppery fumes he breathed into Hasso’s face proved it was a chunk of sausage. “Well, well,” he said, examining the numbers. “Those aren’t what we use, but you’ll follow ours, all right.”
To the Lenelli, one was a horizontal slash. Ten looked like a plus sign. A hundred was a square with a horizontal line through the middle. If you put the symbol for three – three horizontal slashes piled on one another – to the left of the symbol for ten, it meant thirty. If you put it to the right of the symbol for ten, it meant thirteen. The Lenelli didn’t use a zero. The system struck Hasso as better than Roman numerals, not as good as Arabic.
To show him how many people Drammen held, Aderno needed to teach him one more symbol: a square divided into quarters by vertical and horizontal lines. The wizard seemed impressed when he didn’t boggle at the idea of a thousand.
Drammen, by what Aderno wrote, held somewhere between thirty and forty thousand people.
With a patronizing smile, Aderno asked, “And how many people in the town you come from, Hasso Pemsel?”
Hasso had to think about his answer. He took the stick from the wizard and wrote the symbol for four and the symbol for a thousand. Aderno’s smile got wider. Then Hasso wrote the symbol for a thousand again, to the right of the first quartered square.
Velona blinked. Aderno stopped smiling. “No, that can’t be right,” he said impatiently. “You have written the numbers for four thousand thousand – we would say four million. But that is obviously impossible.”
“Four million, ja,” Hasso said. “That’s about how many people there are in Berlin.” At least till the Russians get through with it, he thought glumly. God only knows how many they’ll leave alive.
“You can’t expect me to believe you,” Aderno said.
“You asked me. Now you don’t like the answer,” Hasso said.
“Only a madman would like it,” the wizard insisted. “No one could keep four million people fed. The idea is ridiculous. Even if by some miracle you could, their filth would pile up in mountains. You must be lying.”
Hasso swung the Schmeisser’s muzzle toward him. “What did you say?” he asked softly. “You may want to think about what comes out of your mouth.”
Aderno had the courage of his convictions. “Do not act as if your honor is threatened if I challenge a clear lie,” he said. “It will only make you look more foolish when I use the truth spell.”
“Ah, the truth spell. I forgot about that,” Hasso said. “Yes, go ahead.”
“You really are a crazy man, outlander. If you want to prove it to the world, if you want to prove it to the woman who has taken a fancy to you … well, we can do that.” Aderno aimed a long, lean wizardly forefinger at him. “Tell me again how many people live in this town of yours.”
“About four million,” Hasso answered stolidly.
The wizard sketched a star in the air between them. It glowed green. Velona clapped her hands together and laughed out loud. Aderno look as if someone had stuck a knife in him. “But it can’t be!” he protested – to whom, Hasso wasn’t sure. Most likely to the ghost of his own assumptions.
“You can apologize now,” Hasso said. Or you can kiss my ass. I don’t much care which.
Aderno had the air of a man who’d put out his foot for a step that wasn’t there and fallen five meters. “I think I would rather believe you can fool the truth spell than believe in a city with four thousand thousand people in it,” he muttered.
“Believe whatever you please,” Hasso said. “You asked me, so I told you. If you don’t like it, it’s no skin off my nose. You wanted to brag about how wonderful Drammen is, and you got a surprise. Shall we ride now?”
They rode. As they went along, Velona and Aderno got into a screaming row. Every so often, one of them would point Hasso’s way, so he figured they were arguing about him. Velona went on laughing, so he guessed she believed him, whether the wizard did or not. Hasso heard the words four million more than once. Maybe it would have been better if Aderno hadn’t asked him. Too late to worry about that, though.
Hasso wondered what the ordinary Lenello troopers thought. He couldn’t tell. Those proud faces might have been carved from stone for all they showed. SS recruiting posters with men like that on them would have pulled in twice the volunteers – or maybe none at all, since so many would have despaired of measuring up to that standard.
Still, men were men, horses were horses, pigs were pigs … and Aderno’s unicorn was a goddamn unicorn, and his magic was, without a doubt, real, live magic. Hasso didn’t know much about this world, but he knew it was different from his. And his was different from this one, and the people here seemed to have more trouble than he did working that out.
Drammen lay on the Drammion. Hasso judged the river more impressive than the Spree, which ran through Berlin, but less impressive than the Danube or the Rhine. Barges and sailboats came down the river to the city; sailboats fought their way up to it against the current. No motors anywhere, which didn’t surprise him. He didn’t miss the stink of exhaust.
And if he had, there were plenty of other stinks to savor. He’d grown intimately familiar with horse manure and unwashed humanity during the war. The wind wafted those odors from Drammen to his nose. And with them came the stench of what might have been every sour privy in the world. He’d seen at the castles that the Lenelli didn’t have much of a notion of plumbing. Now, approaching a city – not a large city, by his standards, but a city even so – he got a real whiff of what that meant. No wonder Aderno hadn’t wanted to imagine the filth from four million Berliners.
Catching Velona’s eye, Hasso screwed up his face and held his nose. She laughed and nodded, but then shrugged and spread her hands as if to say, What can you do?
“Cities always stink,” Aderno said.
Sure they do, if there’s no running water and horses shit in the streets, Hasso thought. He didn’t want to think about the flies in Drammen. As if to mock him, a big shiny one lit on the back of his hand. He swatted at it – and missed.
“Stink or no stink, though, have you ever seen finer works than the ones protecting Drammen?” Aderno had his share of hometown pride and then some.
Artillery could have knocked down the curtain walls around the city in hours. The castle on a hill near the center of town would have taken a little longer, but not much. Hasso thought of G Tower again. That reinforced concrete could hold up against damn near anything. It wasn’t a fair comparison, though, and he knew as much.
“They’re very strong,” he said, and by the standards of this world that was bound to be true. The wizard looked pleased, even smug, so he hadn’t sounded too sarcastic. Good.
A group of Grenye leading donkeys were ahead of them at the gate. The sad little beasts were piled high with sacks of this and that, so high that Hasso marveled that their legs didn’t collapse under them. The Grenye, seeing Lenelli behind them, made haste to get out of the way. The Lenelli accepted that as their due.
The guard who swaggered out to question Aderno had top sergeant written all over him, from that rolling, big-bellied walk to the double chin and the silver hair frosting gold. Most officers treated a senior noncom with the respect his position and his years deserved. Aderno didn’t. He spoke more brusquely than Hasso would have in his shoes.
Whatever the wizard said, though, had enough oomph to impress the veteran. The fellow came to attention, saluted with clenched fist over his heart, and waved Aderno’s party through. When Hasso looked up as he rode through the arched gateway, he saw more Lenelli staring down at him through murder holes. In case of trouble, what would they pour on attackers? Boiling water? Boiling oil? Red – hot sand? Something anybody in his right mind would rather give than receive – he was sure of that.
The gateway had two stout, spike-toothed iron portcullises, one near the outer end, the other near the inner. Would even a panzer be enough to smash them down? Hasso wasn’t sure. They didn’t have to worry about panzers here, anyhow.
Inside the wall was a clear space to let troops maneuver. That would be prime real estate. If the king kept people from building there, he had real power. He also had real worries, or worries that seemed real enough to him. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have bothered to keep that area open.
The houses closest to the wall put Hasso in mind of the sorry Grenye huts he’d seen on the way to Drammen. And, as he and his escorts rode through the narrow, stinking streets, he discovered that almost all of the people living in those huts were Grenye. When he saw one obvious Lenello sitting on a front stoop with a jug of wine beside him, he was so surprised that he pointed to the big blond drunken man.
Two troopers’ eyes traveled to the sodden Lenello. As soon as they saw him and recognized him for what he was, they looked away, pretending that they didn’t. After a moment, Hasso realized it went deeper than that. The men on horseback weren’t pretending. They were denying. Were he able to ask them if they saw their compatriot, they would have said no. And they would have meant it, all the way down to the depths of their souls.
Hasso started to ask Aderno why that should be so. Something in the set of the troopers’ jaws, something in the ever so slight narrowing of their eyes, told him that might not be a good idea, especially when he noticed that same existential disapproval clotting the wizard’s features. Aderno must have noted the derelict Lenello, too.
How did the British in India react to one of their own who went native? How had Americans responded to a trader who stayed with the redskins and preferred a squaw to a white woman? A lot like this, unless Hasso missed his guess.
A dumpy Grenye woman came out of the hut and took the jug from the Lenello. She wasn’t trying to keep him sober; she wanted a drink for herself. The blond man gave her a slack – jawed grin and patted her on the ass.
Comparing her to Velona and the other Lenello women Hasso had seen was almost like comparing a gorilla to human beings. That fellow could have had one of those, but he’d ended up with – that? No wonder he drinks, Hasso thought.
Shabby shops and taverns and eateries lay within the first ring of huts. Again, all the proprietors and most of the customers were Grenye. When they bargained, they gesticulated and shouted and jumped up and down and did everything but poke each other in the eye. They reminded Hasso of the Jews in the villages in the east that the Wehrmacht had overrun.
When the shouting got especially raucous, Aderno stuffed his fingers in his ears. The racket had to drive him nuts. Maybe it also damaged his sorcerous sensitivity. Hasso just found it annoying. Velona caught his eye. She pointed to the Schmeisser he wore slung across his back. Then she pointed to eight or ten Grenye, one after another, and made guttural noises in her throat to suggest many rounds going off. And then she laughed and brought a forefinger up to her red lips in a gesture he couldn’t misunderstand. Mischief glinted in her eyes. Without a word, she was saying shooting Grenye was the only way to make them shut up.
A man with an unkempt beard and a mop of curly, dark brown hair came over to the Lenelli riding past. He held up a little jar – what was in it? salve? perfume? fish paste? – and went into a passionate, practiced sales pitch.
“No,” one of the troopers with Hasso said. The Grenye followed, still yakking a blue streak. “No!” the Lenello said again, louder this time. The Grenye had to be used to rejection, because he went right on with his spiel, coming ever closer as he did.
“No!” the Lenello shouted. He lashed out with his right foot. With a kick a World Cup footballer might have envied, he booted the jar out of the Grenye’s hand and sent it flying into a dungheap six or eight meters away.
The Grenye yelped in surprise and pain. All of Hasso’s escorts, even Aderno, laughed at him. Plainly, he was used to that. But his own people laughed at him, too, maybe for pushing too hard, maybe for not getting out of the way fast enough. His head hung as he trudged over to retrieve the jar from its noisome new home. He brightened when he discovered it wasn’t broken, and wiped it off on his tunic so he could try to sell it to some friendlier customer.