After the Downfall by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

didn’t think Aderno fancied him, either. Put all that together and he didn’t want much to do with the wizard. Once in a while, though, he needed a shortcut.
    “They said, ‘Good day, savior of the priestess!’” Aderno told him.
    “Priestess?” Hasso hadn’t known she was one. He chuckled. No nun he’d ever heard of would have said thank - you the way she did.
    “Priestess, yes.” But Aderno didn’t seem quite happy with the German equivalent Hasso offered for what he said. “You might also think of her as the goddess on earth.”
    Hasso glanced over at Velona. She smiled and fluttered her fingers at him. Priestess? Goddess on earth? What the hell have I got into? he wondered. But he liked what he’d got into just fine. Along with Velona and the escort, he rode across the drawbridge and into Castle Drammen. III
    After laying a goddess on earth, getting presented to a mere king was a piece of cake. King Bottero was a great big man, as so many Lenelli seemed to be. Hasso didn’t feel much shorter after he went to his knees in front of the massive, blocky throne than he did before. The king’s guards murmured when Bottero rose and set a hand on Hasso’s shoulder; maybe he didn’t do that for every Hans, Franz, and Dietrich who got an audience.
    Bottero gestured. Hasso got to his feet. Even standing, the top of his head came up to about the bottom of the king’s nose. In Germany, he’d got used to looking at the tops of other people’s heads. Most of the Lenelli could do it to him. He didn’t like that, especially since his sandy hair was beginning to thin up there.
    When the king said something, Hasso had to shrug. “I’m sorry, your Majesty. Don’t speak much Lenello yet,” he said. Velona had taught him your Majesty just before he went into the throne room. What was he supposed to call her? Your Divinity? She was divine, all right, but not in the theological sense of the word.
    Bottero looked annoyed - not at Hasso, but at himself. He said something else. Then he called Aderno’s name. The wizard came up and went to his knees. Bottero spoke to him, impatiently. Get up! Get up! It had to mean something like that. As Aderno rose, he said, “His Majesty says you look like one of us, so he forgot you weren’t.”
    If I’m a Lenello, I look like a damn runt, Hasso thought. They couldn’t shoot you for thinking, not if you kept your big mouth shut. Not even the Gestapo or the NKVD did that. “Tell his Majesty I’m glad to be here.” I’m glad to be anywhere. I wasn’t a good bet to still be breathing now. As usual, Hasso heard the Lenello words without understanding them when the wizard spoke to the king. He couldn’t follow Bottero’s reply, either. But when Aderno spoke to him, he heard Lenello in his ears and what might as well have been German in his mind. “His Majesty says he is glad to have you - all the Lenelli are glad to have you - since you saved the goddess on earth from the Grenye savages.”
    “I was glad to do it,” Hasso said. He’d been glad to do it even before Velona offered him what maidens
    - not that she was - used to call their all. After that...
    After that, he would have followed her to Siam, or maybe to the moon. What would he have done if she were small and dark and plain – Jewish-looking went through his mind
    - and the men chasing her were perfect Aryans? Would he have opened up on them anyway? Or would he have waited to find out what the hell was going on? He had no idea. King Bottero spoke again. “Not half so glad as we were to have it done,” Aderno translated.
    “Where do we go from here?” Hasso asked. He’d seen the Führer a couple of times, but never spoken to him. He would have been awed if he had. Talking to a king didn’t awe him a bit. Talking to this king didn’t, anyhow. If a Kaiser still ruled Germany, or even if he’d met George VI of England, that might have been different. But Bottero seemed no more than an ungodly tall man in odd