“Sorry,” Hasso told him. “I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Shit happens.” Scanno shrugged, then winced again. “Don’t think I got hit so hard since I ran into a dragon’s skull.”
“Right,” Hasso said. Scanno was full of figures of speech for a hangover. He hadn’t heard that one before, but he liked it.
“Wait. Wait.” Scanno shook his head once more, despite the horrible face he pulled as soon as he did it. “You think I’m talking about being drunk, don’t you? I really did run into a dragon’s skull. Came cursed close to killing myself doing it, too.” He got to his feet. It took some effort, but he managed.
Hasso steadied him. “Well, all right. That sounds like a story worth hearing.”
“I know what you mean. You mean you won’t believe a bloody word of it,” the renegade said. That was exactly what Hasso meant, but he didn’t feel like admitting it. Scanno went over to his mug of beer and upended it. Hasso didn’t think he could have drunk so much at a single draught, but he hadn’t had Scanno’s practice. “This was probably about twenty years ago, you understand.”
“Sure,” Hasso said. A lot of things could change in twenty years. Twenty years ago, Hitler was probably just about getting out of jail and publishing Mein Kampf. The Weimar Republic still ruled Germany, whose army was just big enough to blow its own nose, and maybe to sneeze if it got permission from France and Poland first. The shackles of the Treaty of Versailles still held the country down. Hitler’d thrown them off, all right, just the way he promised he would … and started down the path that would wreck the Reich far more completely than Versailles did.
“I was hunting deer in a noble’s forest – you know how it is,” Scanno said.
“Poaching.” Hasso knew just how it was.
“Yeah. You better believe it, buddy.” Scanno’s grin was utterly without self-consciousness – or guilt. “I needed the venison a demon of a lot more than that rich bastard did, too. My backbone was rubbing against my belly, and there aren’t many feelings worse’n that one.”
“Tell me about it.” Hasso had been hungry more than he cared to remember on the Eastern Front. Who hadn’t?
“Uh-huh.” Scanno took hunger for granted, too. In this world, one bad harvest meant people went hungry. Two bad harvests in a row meant famine. Scanno continued, “So there I was, where the law said I wasn’t supposed to be. Right at the beginning of summer, you know, when everything’s all green and grown and luscious – me and my bow, sneaking through the woods.” He grinned again, relishing the memory.
“So you run into a dragon then?” Hasso said. “I hear about one in King Cherso’s realm – what was it, three years gone by now?”
“I heard about that one, too. Never saw it, ‘cause it never came this far south, goddess be praised.” Scanno still swore by the Lenello divinity, then. That was interesting, or might be. “Yeah, I ran into a dragon, all right, only not quite the way you think.”
“Tell me more,” Hasso urged. Scanno could spin a yarn, all right. How much of it to believe … Well, you could always figure that out later.
Before going on, Scanno refilled the mug from a pitcher. “Can’t hardly talk with a dry throat,” he remarked, and poured down another good draught. After what he’d drunk, Hasso wouldn’t have been able to walk, but the Lenello seemed to need more even to feel a buzz. “Where was I?”
“In the woods, running into a dragon.”
“Oh, yeah. I spotted this buck – a big old fat buck. Nice antlers on him, too, if you care about that kind of crap. Me, I was after meat. He was upwind of me, so my scent didn’t give me away. I did the best sneak ever – I mean ever – till I got close enough to draw and let fly. Hit the bastard, too.” He quaffed again.
“Then what happened?” Yes, Hasso was hooked in spite of himself.
“You know how it is. Only way you can kill clean is through the eye or maybe through the heart if you’re lucky. I got him maybe a palm’s breadth back of the heart. He was gonna die, and die pretty cursed quick, but not right there, worse luck. He took off running, and I took off running after him. I didn’t want to lose him. You better believe I didn’t – he would’ve kept me eating for days and days.”
“How did you run into the dragon, then?” Hasso asked.
“How? With my head, that’s how. I was crashing through the bushes after the stag, and I tried crashing through one and crashed into the dragon’s skull instead. The bushes had grown up so you couldn’t see the bones – I guess all that dead dragon made good manure for them. I went wham! Next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground, and quite a while had gone by.”
“How could you…? Oh. The sun.” Hasso felt foolish. He was used to wrist-watches and clocks and always knowing just what time it was. Getting accustomed to slower, more approximate timekeeping hadn’t been easy.
Scanno nodded. “That’s right. I woke up with a demon of a headache, and with a goose’s egg right between my eyes. If I was going a little bit faster, I bet I would’ve broken my stupid head. I got up – that took some doing, too – and I found what I’d run into.”
“What about the buck?” Hasso asked.
“Gone,” Scanno said mournfully. “I lost the blood trail the other side of those bushes hiding the skeleton. The headache I had, I lost my appetite, too, but I knew that would come back sooner or later. I didn’t quite starve, or I wouldn’t be here now, right?”
“Right,” Hasso said. “It’s a good story.”
“But you don’t believe a word of it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Like you needed to.” Scanno drew out something on a thong from under his tunic. Lots of Lenelli and Grenye wore amulets of one kind or another. Scanno’s was plainer than most: a fragment of what looked like bone, drilled through so it would take the leather thong. “This is dragon skull. I worried it off with my knife. Hard like anything – I had to hone the blade afterwards.”
“All right.” For all Hasso knew, the bit of bone came from a donkey. He didn’t want to argue with Scanno, though. What was the use? He couldn’t prove the Lenello renegade was lying.
Or maybe he could, if he could master the truth spell Aderno had used. Would it work here in Falticeni? Most magic seemed to falter here. And Aderno’s spell, for that matter, had faltered against Scanno back in Drammen.
Instead of experimenting with sorcery, Hasso asked, “Do you want to throw me around for a while?”
“Sure!” Scanno said eagerly, and he did.
Hasso used the baths in the palace almost every day. Scanno laughed at him for that; the Lenelli were a less cleanly folk than the Bucovinans. Hasso took the ribbing and ignored it. He’d been clean and he’d been dirty, and he liked clean better. Besides, even with the drafts, the bathhouse had to be the warmest room in the palace.
Rautat noticed his habits, too. “One more thing that says you really aren’t one of those people, even if you look like them,” the veteran underofficer remarked as he scrubbed in a hot pool of an afternoon. His scars weren’t puckered craters like Hasso’s; they were long, pale lines on his dark skin.
“I’m me, that’s all,” Hasso answered. They were both using Bucovinan. Hasso had got to the point where he could follow it pretty well. He spoke more hesitantly.
“Yeah, well, you aren’t so bad.” Rautat ducked his head under the water and came up blowing like a porpoise.
“Thanks.” Hasso submerged, too.
When he came up, a couple of women were walking past, heading for another pool. They chatted idly, paying Rautat no attention and Hasso hardly any; people in the palace were used to him by now. Neither of them wore any more than she’d been born with. The Bucovinans were easy in their skins, easier than the Lenelli and much easier than any Germans except a few resolute naturists.