After the Downfall by Harry Turtledove Page A

King Bottero heard the name, he made a horrible face, too.
    “Bucovin?” Hasso echoed, as he was no doubt meant to do.
    “The heart of the Grenye infection,” Aderno said grimly. He pointed. “It lies to the east.”
    Bottero spoke. “His Majesty says the Grenye lie all the time, and from any direction.”
    “Heh,” Hasso said. How close to the border was Castle Svarag? Had Velona been escaping from Bucovin? If she had, why didn’t the people on her heels carry anything better than peasant weapons? All kinds of interesting questions. But a bigger one occurred to Hasso: “You have magic and the Grenye don’t?”
    “Certainly.” Aderno drew himself up like an affronted cat. “We are Lenelli, after all, and they are only Grenye.” When the wizard translated the question for the king, Bottero’s big head bobbed up and down.
    “Right,” Hasso said. He hoped the sarcasm wouldn’t make it through the translation spell. To try to blunt it if it did, he went on, “What I don’t understand is, if you can work magic and they can’t, why didn’t you beat them a long time ago?” He thought of the conquistadors with their guns and horses and dogs and iron armor, and of the Indians who’d gone down in windrows before them. Again, Aderno turned the question into Lenello for his king. “We’re getting there,” Bottero said. “Our ships only found this land two centuries ago. We’ve pushed the savages back a long way from the sea. But Bucovin ... Bucovin is difficult.” He nodded again, seeming pleased he’d found the right word. Hitler would have said that about the Russians in 1942. And he would have been right - much righter than he knew then, in fact. The Reich and the Russians were both behind Hasso forever now. So I’m in the New World, am I? he thought. Bottero didn’t look a bit like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and probably nothing like what’s-his-name, Roosevelt’s replacement, either. None of that brainfuzz mattered a pfennig’s worth to the Lenelli. “Difficult how?” Hasso asked, as any soldier might. Aderno didn’t look happy about translating the question. King Bottero didn’t look happy about answering it, either. He bit off some harsh-sounding words. “When we attacked the Grenye there, we had a couple of armies come to grief.” Aderno echoed what the king said so Hasso could understand. “We don’t know exactly why.”
    “Did they somehow learn magic on their own?” Hasso thought about Indians learning to ride horses and shoot guns.
    But the wizard shook his head. After he translated the question, so did the king. This time, Aderno showed no hesitation in answering on his own: “It is not possible. They are Grenye, and mindblind. There are no wizards among them. There never have been. There never will be. There never can be.”
    Slavs are Untermenschen. All we have to do is hit them a good lick and they’ll fall over, went through the German’s mind. How much baggage he brought from the world he’d fled! Would he ever escape it? How could he? It made him what he was.
    Something he’d seen in this world occurred to him. “When we rode into Drammen, do you remember that drunken Lenello with the Grenye girlfriend we saw?”
    By Aderno’s expression, he might have stuck pins under the wizard’s fingernails. Very unwillingly, Aderno nodded. Even more unwillingly, he said, “I remember.” The king barked a question. Most unwillingly of all, Aderno translated Hasso’s question. What Bottero said after that should have scorched paint off the walls. When the king ran down, Aderno found a question of his own: “Why do you ask?” In contrast to his sovereign’s words, his might have been carved off a glacier.
    “I was wondering whether some Lenello renegade might have made magic for Bucovin if the Grenye couldn’t do it on their own,” Hasso said.
    Again, King Bottero had to ask his wizard for a translation. When he got one, he did some more cursing, but then shook his head