“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.