After the Downfall

The German knew how to deal with Rautat. He’d handled plenty of Feldwebels in his Wehrmacht days. The language here changed. So did a few of the details. The art as a whole? No.

Dealing with Drepteaza as a lover … That he had to learn one step at a time. It wasn’t simple, either. There were moments when he felt like a man trying to defuse a booby-trapped bomb. The priestess was more private and much more complicated than Velona had been. When Drepteaza was unhappy, she’d retreat into herself. She would stay polite all the time. If you weren’t paying attention, you wouldn’t notice anything was wrong. Then you would lose more points for not noticing.

Hasso complained only once. She laughed at him. “This is what you spent so long mooning over and chasing. Now you have it, and you find out it isn’t exactly what you expected? What am I supposed to do about that? I am what I am. I can’t be anything different, not for you or anyone else.”

He shut up after that. She was telling the truth. And she had to put up with him, too. Well, no – in fact, she didn’t. She could dump him any time she pleased.

But she didn’t do that. It was as if she’d decided that, as long as they were going to be lovers, she would see just where that led. “Your world must be a fu

“Why?” he asked.

“You are a fighting man. Rautat says you are one of the most dangerous fighting men he ever saw. From everything I’ve seen, he’s right. But you are the gentlest lover any woman here would ever have known.”

He grunted. Velona never accused him of every such thing. Everybody, he supposed, was different with a different partner.

“Why is that?” Drepteaza persisted.

“Partly, it’s you.” He pursued his own thought. Drepteaza made a small, dubious noise. “It is,” Hasso insisted. “And partly, men and women in my world are closer to equals than they are here.”

“Oh?” That intrigued her in a new way, as he hoped it might. “How? Why?”

Later, he wondered whether Bucovinan – and maybe even Lenello – men would have reason to swear at him. As best he could, he explained how women’s rights had flowered in his world over the past hundred years.

Drepteaza reacted the way he knew she would: “That sounds wonderful! Why isn’t it like that here?”

“I don’t know,” Hasso answered.

“You say it wasn’t always like that where you come from? It used to be more the way it is here?” Drepteaza waited for him to nod, then went on, “How are things in your kingdom different now from the way they used to be?”

“Machines,” Hasso said automatically. “We have machines to do the things magic can do here. But the machines do it better. They do it for everybody, not just for a few rich people. And with lots of machines, it doesn’t matter so much if men are bigger than women. It doesn’t matter so much if men are stronger. What you know, what you can do – that matters.”

“Women are still the ones who have babies, though,” Drepteaza said.

“Ja” Hasso nodded.”That is one reason there are still differences. But women have babies more when they want in my world.” He explained about rubbers.

“How do you make them?” Drepteaza demanded. “They would be marvelous!” The Bucovinans – and the Lenelli – used pulling out in time for contraception, when they bothered to pull out in time. They also used blowjobs and buggery, which were more fun for men than for women. Women here had lots of children. Lots of kids died here, but lots were born.

Hasso spread his hands. “No idea.” He hadn’t seen anything like rubber here. And had the locals had it, he didn’t know how to make it thin enough for condoms. There were the ones they called skins, though…. “Sheep gut might do.”

“Like a sausage casing.” Drepteaza giggled and reached for him. “Just like a sausage casing.” Even if he didn’t usually manage two rounds close together, he surprised himself and did that night. Afterwards, he slept like a log.

The next morning, as they got ready to go back to Falticeni, Drepteaza kept going on about equality for women, and about condoms. She didn’t seem to be able to think or talk about anything else. Hasso knew he’d changed things here with his knowledge of war. He hadn’t thought what he knew about other things in his lost world might change them here, too.

Listening to Drepteaza talk, he could tell he’d been naive. She was bubbling with excitement, as if she wanted to pack a hundred years into a day. Hasso wasn’t the only one listening to her, either. Rautat sidled up to him and asked, “Why is the priestess all loopy? What kind of bullshit have you been feeding her?”

“I tell her how things are in my world,” Hasso answered uneasily.

“How the broads rule the roost? How nobody there ever gets knocked up, and they find babies under the cabbage leaves?” Rautat was exaggerating – but, if you listened to Drepteaza for a while, you wouldn’t think he was exaggerating by much. He eyed Hasso. “If half of what she says is so, you’re lucky you got out of that place. It’s a demon of a lot better here.”

Hasso was lucky he’d got out of his own world, but not for the reasons Rautat imagined. “You may be right,” he said, and let it go at that.

He swung up onto his horse easily enough. He’d ridden on the Eastern Front, too. You couldn’t always find a halftrack or a VW going where you needed to. If you didn’t want to walk, you went on horseback.

And he was heading back towards a capital that hadn’t fallen, unlike the one from which the Omphalos stone had hurled him. A capital more like Moscow than Berlin, he thought uncomfortably. In some ways, the Lenelli did remind him of the Germans he would never see again. In others, they made him think of the Teutonic Knights, who’d gone east against the Slavs in days gone by – and also eventually ended up losing to them. In still others, they might have been Spaniards or Anglo-Saxons bumping up against Indians.

They weren’t just like any of those groups. However you looked at it, though, Hasso wasn’t on the side he would have chosen for himself. Well, sometimes you got your sides chosen for you, that was all. The Bucovinans were people, too. Drepteaza was a very sweet person. Hasso smiled in the saddle.

The Ivans he’d fought were also people. He supposed their pagan ancestors who’d faced the Teutonic Knights were people as well. The Red Indians? No doubt about it.

He let out a startled grunt. Maybe even the Jews were people. He hadn’t thought so for years – it wasn’t safe or easy to think so, not in the Reich. But he’d known a few back in Weimar days – not well or anything, but he had. They hadn’t seemed… so bad.

If they hated Germans now, hadn’t Germany given them reason to? He didn’t know what all had happened during the war. You didn’t want to know stuff like that, not officially. But what if it was all a big fuckup? Wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass?

XXV

Except for the stinks, Hasso was glad to get back to Falticeni. And Lord Zgomot seemed as glad to have him back as he was ever glad about anything – which is to say, not very. The Lord of Bucovin said, “So the gunpowder shells work the way you want them to, do they?”

“Close enough, Lord,” Hasso answered.

Zgomot plucked a white hair from his beard. He twirled it between his fingers and let it fall. “Close enough is as much as you can expect in life most of the time, isn’t it?”

“I don’t argue with that, Lord,” the Wehrmacht officer said.

“You’d better not,” Zgomot told him. “You’re old enough to know. So tell me, Hasso Pemsel – are you happy now that Drepteaza’s finally sleeping with you?”

“Close enough, Lord,” Hasso repeated, deadpan.

The Lord of Zgomot grunted. “Well, I’ll forgive that from you – you had the Lenello goddess on earth in your bed for a while. That must have been something. Wearing, I’d guess, but something all the same. But tell me this: is Drepteaza happy, now that she’s finally sleeping with you?”