“Tell him I’m insulted,” Hasso said in the same language. “Tell him the least he could do is cook them first.”
Rautat translated that. Hasso wondered whether he would get a laugh or start a fight. He outweighed the native by close to thirty kilos, so brawling didn’t seem fair. But he didn’t intend to let the Bucovinan pound on him without hitting back.
The soldier stared at Rautat, then stared at him. “He said that?” the man said; Hasso had no trouble at all following him. Then the fellow started to chuckle, and he said something the Wehrmacht officer didn’t understand before going back to his own table.
“What was that?” Hasso asked Rautat.
In Lenello, Rautat answered, “He said you may be a big blond bastard, but you may almost be a human being, too.”
“Thank you,” Hasso said, deadpan, putting the polite particle at the end. Rautat broke up. Hasso took another pull at his mug of beer. The Grenye were recognizable human beings, too, even if they couldn’t work magic – maybe especially because they couldn’t.
When Rautat and the rest of the guards brought Hasso back to the palace, he got a surprise. While he was gone, the servants had cleaned up his cell and taken out the nasty straw pallet, replacing it with a wool-stuffed mattress on a wooden frame with leather lashings. They’d given him a stool and a basin and pitcher – and a brazier, to fight the freezing breezes that howled in through the window. Now it was a real room – almost.
He bowed to Rautat. “Thank you,” he said again, this time with the polite particle in front to show he was sincere.
“Don’t – it wasn’t my idea.” Rautat repeated himself till Hasso understood, then added, “If you want to thank anybody, thank the priestess. She’s in charge of stuff like this.” Again, he doubled back till the German got it.
“I do that,” Hasso said.
He didn’t get a chance till late in the afternoon. He spent some of the time in between asleep on the nice, new mattress. All too soon, it would be full of bugs, as the old one had been. He didn’t like that, but after more than five years of war in Europe he didn’t think it was the end of the world, either. He’d been lousy and fleabitten and bedbug-bedeviled before. You itched, you scratched, you killed what you could, and you got on with your life.
When Drepteaza came in – accompanied, as usual, by tough little Bucovinan guards – he bowed lower to her than he had to Rautat. “I thank you,” he said, the polite particle properly in front, and waved to show why he was thanking her.
The native soldiers laughed at him. Drepteaza smiled, “You say, ‘I thank you’” she told him, using the feminine form of the pronoun. Hasso swore in German, which made him feel better and didn’t offend anybody here, and thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. Too goddamn much stuff to remember! Drepteaza went on, “And I say that you are welcome. You will be here a while. You may as well be comfortable.”
He doubted he would ever be comfortable in this world. The twentieth century had too much that simply didn’t exist here. Electricity, hot and cold running water, refrigeration, glazed windows, phonographs and photographs, radios, cars… But, again, he’d done without most of that stuff for years. You didn’t have to have it, the way so many people thought you did. Life was nicer with it, sure, but you could manage without.
“And you’ll earn these things,” the priestess said. “We do expect to learn from you, you know.” She repeated herself in Lenello so he could have no doubt about what she meant.
“I understand,” he answered, which wasn’t the same as promising to deliver. Whatever he gave the Bucovinans would hurt the Lenelli. The hope that he would give them things that would hurt the Lenelli was the only reason the natives hadn’t murdered him instead of taking him prisoner.
Drepteaza eyed him shrewdly. “You understand, but you don’t want to do it. Plenty of real Lenelli do, and you aren’t one.”
You’re just as foreign there as you are here, so why not help us? That was what she meant, all right. She wasn’t quite right, though. Hasso felt more at home among the Lenelli than he did here, and he doubted things would have been different had he landed here first. The Lenelli came closer to thinking the way he did. They were conquerors. They were winners. Bucovin was a land trying to figure out how not to lose. It wasn’t the same.
He couldn’t say that to Drepteaza without insulting her. So he said something simpler: “I swear – swore – an oath to King Bottero.”
“I’ve heard about it.” The swarthy little priestess looked at him. “How much would your oath matter if you weren’t sleeping with that blond cow?”
“Velona’s no cow!” Hasso exclaimed: the first thought that sprang into his head. You could call her all kinds of things, but cow? If you called her a cow, you’d never met her and you had no notion, no notion at all, what she was like.
Drepteaza gave him the native equivalent of a curtsy; it looked more like a dance step. “Excuse me,” she said with wintry politeness. “That blond serpent, should I call her? That blond wolf-bitch?”
Those both came closer. Still, Hasso said, “I don’t insult you or your folk.”
This time, Drepteaza looked through him. “The Lenelli are not your folk. You said so yourself.”
And he had, again and again. “But – ” he began.
“But what?” The priestess sounded genuinely confused. Then her eyes widened. She said something in Bucovinan that he didn’t get. She must have seen he didn’t, for she went back to Lenello: “You really love her!” She couldn’t have seemed more appalled had she accused him of breakfasting on Grenye babies.
He remembered that Velona had sounded just as horrified herself when she realized the same thing. “Well, what if I do?” he said roughly, doing his best to forget that.
“Moths fly into torch flames because they must. Do they love them when they do?” Drepteaza said – the exact figure Velona had used.
Hasso’s ears heated. “I don’t know. I’m not a moth,” he said.
“No, you’re not, which only makes it worse. You have a choice, and you choose to be a fool,” Drepteaza told him.
The more she argued with him, the more she put his back up. “What am I supposed to do? Tell my heart no?” he asked.
“You would if you had any sense. If you had any sense – ” Drepteaza broke off and threw her hands in the air. “Oh, what’s the use? If you could show a fool his folly, he wouldn’t be a fool anymore.” She turned and spoke to the guards in Bucovinan: “Come on. It’s hopeless. He’s hopeless.”
Hasso understood that just fine. Yes, she was a good teacher. She just didn’t want to teach him anymore. The closing door and the thud of the bar on the outside falling back into place had a dreadfully final sound.
He wondered whether the Bucovinans would take away his small comforts again and remind him he was a prisoner. For that matter, he wondered whether he would find out how ingenious the local torturer was. If you told your captors things they didn’t want to hear, you had to expect to pay the price.
Drepteaza really hadn’t wanted to hear that he loved Velona. For that matter, neither had Velona. It would have been funny if it hadn’t put his ass in a sling. Hell, it was pretty funny anyhow.
They went on feeding him, and the food stayed better than the prison slop he’d had before. Somebody – maybe Drepteaza, maybe Lord Zgomot, maybe just Rautat – was in a merciful mood, at least as far as that went. Not expecting any mercies, Hasso was grateful even for small ones.
He spent the next several days wondering whether small ones were the only ones he’d get. The natives who brought him food didn’t speak to him, and didn’t answer when he tried to speak to them. Neither did the ones who emptied his chamber pot.
And nobody else showed up. Drepteaza didn’t come in to teach him more Bucovinan. Rautat didn’t come in with guards to escort him around Falticeni. They let him stew in his own juices instead.