Slavs are Untermenschen. All we have to do is hit them a good lick and they'll fall over, went through the German's mind. How much baggage he brought from the world he'd fled! Would he ever escape it? How could he? It made him what he was.
Something he'd seen in this world occurred to him. "When we rode into Drammen, do you remember that drunken Lenello with the Grenye girlfriend we saw?"
By Aderno's expression, he might have stuck pins under the wizard's fingernails. Very unwillingly, Aderno nodded. Even more unwillingly, he said, "I remember." The king barked a question. Most unwillingly of all, Aderno translated Hasso's question. What Bottero said after that should have scorched paint off the walls. When the king ran down, Aderno found a question of his own: "Why do you ask?" In contrast to his sovereign's words, his might have been carved off a glacier.
"I was wondering whether some Lenello renegade might have made magic for Bucovin if the Grenye couldn't do it on their own," Hasso said.
Again, King Bottero had to ask his wizard for a translation. When he got one, he did some more cursing, but then shook his head and answered the question. "There was no magic used against us," he said flatly. "None. We failed anyhow, failed twice, failed badly. Our own magic faltered there. Other Lenello kingdoms have failed, too. Bucovin is… difficult. We have not sent an army there for a while. Maybe we will try again before too long — there has been talk of it. But we will be wary if we do."
"I see." Hasso wasn't sure he did. Plainly, though, the Lenelli didn't see what had gone wrong against the… difficult Bucovin, either.
Bottero gave him a crooked grin. "Now that you know my realm's old shame, outlander, will you still take service with me against my enemies, whoever they may be?"
What would the king and the wizard do if he said no? They'd throw him out on his ear, that was what. And so would Velona, and he'd deserve it. What would happen to him them? Would he end up a drunken stumblebum in the Grenye part of town?
He hadn't crossed worlds for that. He gave Bottero his own salute, arm thrust out ahead of him. "Yes, your Majesty!"
The ritual that followed came straight from the Middle Ages. Following Aderno's instructions, Hasso dropped to both knees again and held out his hands clasped together. King Bottero enfolded them in his own big mitts. "I am your man," Hasso said, prompted by Aderno. "I pledge you my full faith against all men who may live and die, so help me God." A Lenello would have sworn by the goddess, he supposed. He wondered if Aderno would correct him, but the wizard let it go.
Bottero hauled him to his feet with effortless ease. The king wasn't just a big man; he was strong, too. He leaned forward and kissed Hasso on both cheeks. They were big, smacking kisses, the kind a Russian might have given — no French sophistication here.
"You are my man. I accept your homage. By the goddess, I will do nothing to make myself not deserve it," Bottero said through the wizard. "I welcome you to my service."
"Thank you, your Majesty." Hasso felt better because of the oath he'd sworn. Now he had a real place here. He belonged. He didn't know all of what that place entailed yet, but he could find out. He wasn't just somebody who'd fallen from nowhere. He was one of King Bottero's men. All the Lenelli would understand that. So would the Grenye.
A couple of small, dark servants came into the throne room. They started sweeping and dusting. None of the Lenelli paid any attention to them; they might have been part of the furniture. As they worked, they chattered in low voices in a croaking, guttural language that sounded nothing like Lenello.
"What are they saying?" Hasso asked Aderno.
The wizard shrugged. "I have no idea. It could only matter to another Grenye."
"Doesn't your translation spell work on their language?" Hasso couldn't imagine why it wouldn't. Why have a translation spell if you weren't going to use it to understand a tongue you didn't speak?
"It would," Aderno said with the air of a man making a great concession. "But why would I care to listen to Grenye grunting? I'd just as soon listen to what the king's hunting hounds had to say."
Hasso would have been interested to hear what dogs had to say, too. All the same… "Bottero's hounds won't plot to murder you in your bed one fine night." He knew the risk of keeping Russian servants on the Eastern Front. Some Germans got by with it. A lot of Russians hated Stalin worse than Hitler. But Hasso had never been tempted. It would have been just his luck to draw somebody who was playacting.
King Bottero laughed when the wizard told him what the German's words meant. "These are also my dogs," the king said, waving toward the Grenye. "They will not bite."
He seemed very sure of himself, and of his servants. Hasso glanced at the Grenye again. They went about their work with their heads down, and seemed to pay little more heed to the Lenelli than their masters did to them. But a certain slight stiffness in the way they moved made Hasso sure they understood Lenello, even if the Lenelli didn't bother to understand them.
"Goddess on earth?" Hasso asked Velona, the Lenello words strange in his mouth.
They lay side by side on the bed of his small chamber in Castle Drammen. No matter what Velona was, he was only a new vassal of ambiguous rank. Chances were he got a chamber of his own only because she fancied him. Otherwise, he would have drawn a cot or a straw pallet in the common room with the belching, farting, snoring ordinary soldiers.
He wouldn't have minded. He'd done that often enough. But this was much, much better.
The bed was small, too, which meant he and Velona touched even when they lay side by side. The tip of her breast just brushed the skin of his arm. She smelled of clean sweat and cinnamon. If she was a goddess, she was a very human one.
She nodded, which made shadows swoop across the promontories of her face. The only light in the room came from a lamp that sputtered and added the odor of hot mutton fat to the air. "That's right," she said.
"What does it mean?" Hasso asked the question a dozen times a day.
Velona looked surprised when he asked now. "What it says, of course."
"What is that?" Things Hasso wanted to say bubbled up inside him: how in his world there were no goddesses on earth, or even gods; how God Himself seemed far away, if He was there at all; how the age of miracles, or the age when people believed in miracles, was long gone.
And yet a little miracle, or something a hell of a lot like one, had brought him here from burning Berlin. But even if the Fuhrer was as close to a god on earth as people knew in these grimly rational days, it would have taken more than a little miracle to save the Reich from the clutches of the Russian bear, the American eagle, and the British lion.
Speaking German, all that would have burst free in a torrent of words. In Lenello, he was limited to questions that made him sound like a Dummkopf. Sooner or later, he would understand more. He'd been through enough to teach him patience the hard way.
"You really don't know." Velona sounded amazed.
"I really don't know." Hasso hoped he got the conjugation right.
She laughed — not at him, he didn't think. "The goddess lives in me," she said, touching the inside of her left breast to show what she meant. "Sometimes I am Velona, sometimes I am the goddess, sometimes I am the goddess and Velona at the same time." She spoke slowly and simply to give him a chance to understand.
"How to know — how I to know — which?" he asked.
He wondered if she would laugh again, but she didn't. "When I ran out of Bucovin, the goddess filled me. I could not have run like that if she hadn't. Those Grenye you saw chasing me, those weren't the first ones who came after me. I left the others in the dust."