Free After the Downfall by Harry Turtledove Page A

understand, no doubt thinking that better than a raging brawl. And she showed no sign whatever that she didn’t intend to lay King Bottero.
    Some of the Lenelli chased Grenye women more as the solstice neared. The big blond men seemed to do a bit of that all the time. The Grenye had a hard time saying no, and their menfolk took their lives in their hands if they presumed to challenge their superiors. The Lenelli had the power of law behind them, and the power of size, and the power of military training.
    And a good many Grenye women didn’t want to say no. Hasso had seen that before, in France and in Russia. Losers’ women were often easy. Sometimes they saw the other side’s victorious soldiers as, literally, meal tickets. You could do better for yourself in an occupier’s bed than in one where you slept all alone. Occupiers also had a kind of glamour because they were victorious, in stark contrast to your own worthless odds and sods who couldn’t defend the country against them. Sometimes, also, people fell in love, and who’d been on which side to start with hardly seemed to matter. Those were the affairs that turned out best - and worst. They could lead to marriages, despite regulations. Or they could lead to disaster when a soldier got transferred or when somebody decided who was on which side counted after all.
    Hasso wondered what would happen if Velona caught him with a little dark Grenye. Actually, he didn’t wonder. She would scream. She would break things. She would throw things. She would throw him out. To him, her joining Bottero seemed as much a betrayal as that would have been. But she couldn’t see it from his point of view. If he tried to tell a Catholic woman not to take communion, she’d spit in his eye. And Velona wasn’t just a woman taking communion. She was a priestess giving communion, too. She was the deity for whom communion was given. No wonder she wouldn’t listen to him. He could see that. He hated it anyway.
    Much good it did him. Horns and drums woke him at sunrise, welcoming the longest day of the year with a raucous racket. He hadn’t got too smashed the night before. His head didn’t hurt or anything. But he wasn’t thrilled about rising with the birds - and he was, because he could hear them chirping somewhere not far enough away.
    The alleged music woke Velona up, too. Seeing her smile at him from a few centimeters away went a long way toward reconciling him to being awake. “Big day today!” she said, the way anyone back home might have on a holiday morning.
    “Yes.” Hasso knew he sounded grumpy - hell, he sounded downright dismal - but he couldn’t help it. Velona laughed and poked him. “I do know what’s bothering you,” she said, and then she made damn sure it wouldn’t bother him for a while. Afterwards, she kissed him and asked, “There - is it better now?”
    “Yes.” This time, he sounded happier about things. Velona kissed him again before she got out of bed. Even so, the real answer was yes and no.
    He had that whole long day to brood about her going off to Bottero’s bedchamber. But it turned out to be even worse. Grenye servants set up a bed in the middle of the courtyard. They aren’t going to - ? Hasso thought, scandalized.
    But they were. As sunset neared, an enormous crowd gathered around the bed, eating and drinking and talking and waiting expectantly. Bottero came out of the castle and pushed his way through. He was naked as the day he was born, but much bigger. “Goddess!” he boomed, standing by the bed. “I summon you, goddess!”
    Velona came out, too. The crowd cleared by itself for her. Her golden nakedness might well have been divine; it seemed to draw all the fading light to itself. “I come, your Majesty!” she answered. “I come!”
    They lay down on the bed together, right there in front of everybody. They did, and then she did, loudly. Hasso got very drunk.
    IV
    Hasso woke the next morning with a colossal hangover and an