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.

A man with an unkempt beard and a mop of curly, dark brown hair came over to the Lenelli riding past. He held up a little jar – what was in it? salve? perfume? fish paste? – and went into a passionate, practiced sales pitch.

“No,” one of the troopers with Hasso said. The Grenye followed, still yakking a blue streak. “No!” the Lenello said again, louder this time. The Grenye had to be used to rejection, because he went right on with his spiel, coming ever closer as he did.

“No!” the Lenello shouted. He lashed out with his right foot. With a kick a World Cup footballer might have envied, he booted the jar out of the Grenye’s hand and sent it flying into a dungheap six or eight meters away.

The Grenye yelped in surprise and pain. All of Hasso’s escorts, even Aderno, laughed at him. Plainly, he was used to that. But his own people laughed at him, too, maybe for pushing too hard, maybe for not getting out of the way fast enough. His head hung as he trudged over to retrieve the jar from its noisome new home. He brightened when he discovered it wasn’t broken, and wiped it off on his tunic so he could try to sell it to some friendlier customer.

Inside the ring of shops, closer to the castle, dwelt the Lenelli. Had Hasso not already known, one glance at their homes would have told him who was on top here and who was on the bottom. Wide, well – kept lawns separated one Lenello home from another; the overlords weren’t packed cheek by jowl the way their subjects were. Each Lenello home was at least six or eight times as big as a Grenye hut. The buildings were solidly made of stone or brick. They weren’t built from wattle and daub and whatever scraps a Grenye could beg, borrow, or scrounge. They had roofs of red tile or gray or green slate, not tired thatch and bits of planking. The Grenye would have fallen in love with corrugated sheet iron if only they’d heard of it. Most of the Lenello homes could have doubled as fortresses. Even their stables and other outbuildings were far finer, far sturdier, than anything the Grenye lived in.

Velona saw Hasso eyeing the Lenelli’s houses. “Aren’t they good?” she said.

He understood that, and nodded. “Yes. Good,” he said. There was a word you soon learned whenever you picked up a new language.

“Lenelli are good,” Velona said.”Grenye…”Hasso had already seen she was a good mimic. Now he discovered she could do an uncanny impersonation of a grunting hog. It startled a laugh out of him. She pointed ahead. “And the king lives – there,” she said.

The gesture was nicely timed. They’d just come round a corner. An avenue – or as close to an avenue as Drammen boasted – led straight to the royal palace. If the avenue was muddy and rutted and odorous… well, what streets in this world weren’t? The palace was an impressive piece of architecture, no two ways about it.

A moat surrounded the gray stone outer walls. Soldiers on the walkway atop the outwalls surveyed the city between chest – high crenellations. Hasso had seen the towers of the keep even from outside the city walls. A red flag floated from the tallest of them. His lips quirked in a mirthless smile. He couldn’t hold that banner against the Lenelli, even if he’d been fighting one very much like it for almost four years. Yeah, artillery could have breached the walls and knocked down the towers in jig time. But he wouldn’t have wanted to try taking the place without it.

They rode down the avenue. It wasn’t the same as parading under the Brandenburg Gate after France fell. It really wasn’t the same as parading under the Brandenburg Gate would have been after Russia fell. Hasso feared only the Red Army was parading through Berlin these days. Was anything left of the Brandenburg Gate?

He shrugged. He’d never know. And a glance at his comrades said they all thought approaching the royal palace was a pretty big deal. Even Aderno looked like a second lieutenant about to get the Knight’s Cross straight from the Fuhrer himself.

What would happen to Hitler with Berlin falling? Hasso tried to imagine him in Russian captivity. The picture didn’t want to form. The Fuhrer would do anything, anything at all, before he let himself turn into Stalin’s plaything. Why couldn’t England and the USA see that, if Germany went down, the last dam against the spread of Bolshevism fell? It was as if they thought the Reich even worse, which struck him as insane.

He shrugged again. He would never know the answer there. As soon as his backside touched the Omphalos, he’d put his own world behind him forever. He didn’t have many answers here, either, but he could hope he would one of these days.

Velona caught his eye and winked. She blew him a kiss. “You will see the king. He will like you.” She made it sound simple and inevitable. She didn’t seem so overawed as the wizard and the troopers.

If you can keep your head when all those about you are losing theirs … chances are you don’t understand the situation. Hasso knew too well that he didn’t.

He found out how much he didn’t understand in short order. Another man – another wizard? – rode a unicorn up to the guards at the outer end of the drawbridge just ahead of the group of which the Wehrmacht officer was a part. The guards talked with him for a moment, then stood aside and let him through.

Then Hasso’s group approached. When the guards saw them, they stiffened to attention and saluted. Then they bowed themselves almost double, and then, straightening, they saluted again. They bawled out some sort of honorific or another – Hasso didn’t understand it, but he heard the fervor with which they shouted it. SS troopers yelled, “Heil Hitler!” the same way.

The fuss wasn’t for Hasso. Nobody at the castle knew him from the man in the moon. It wasn’t for Aderno. Hasso had figured out the wizard’s place in the scheme of things: he was hired help. He was high – class hired help, entitled to some respect, like a first-rate dentist back in the Reich. But nobody jumped through hoops for a dentist there, and nobody was likely to jump through hoops for Aderno here. The mounted soldiers? They were exactly what they looked like – muscle, nothing else.

No. The guards were having conniptions because Velona was back. She said something to them, then pointed toward Hasso. As soon as she did that, they saluted him, too.

Uneasily, he returned the salute. “Hello. Good day,” he said, a couple of phrases in Lenello that couldn’t land him in too much trouble.

“Good day,” they chorused, and then something he didn’t understand.

“What does that mean?” he asked Aderno. He wanted to learn Lenello on his own. If he had the wizard magically translating for him, he wouldn’t. And he didn’t like Aderno all that much, and he 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.