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a couple of Grenye dumping garbage on the midden. He might have been talking about a yoke of oxen.
    “It may be there, but I don’t know how to use it. Even if I did, could I reach back into my old world, like that?” Hasso asked.
    “I don’t know,” Aderno admitted. “If your world is so inimical to sorcery, maybe not. Maybe a wizard in the capital will have a better notion than I do.” He shook his head. “He may have a better notion. There aren’t many wizards, even among us. Whether any of them will know of your world and what it is like ... well, who can say?”
    The commandant at Castle Kalmar gave the travelers fresh horses to speed them on their way. Hasso took that as a mixed blessing; he’d started getting used to the animal he was riding. His new mount seemed more spirited, which was the last thing he wanted. Trucks and cars didn’t vary so much. He found out that Drammen, the name of the capital, meant something like high and mighty in the Lenello language. Aderno was ready to go on and on about the place, but Hasso didn’t want to listen to him. He tried his few words of Lenello with Velona instead. He might not follow her, but he enjoyed trying.
    She used gestures to show him Drammen was big, and opened and closed her hand many times to show him it was populous. “How many people?” he asked. When they stopped, he drew in the dirt with a stick to show her he understood the idea of written numbers. To show one was easy. Five and ten weren’t hard, and fifty and a hundred just took patience.
    Velona got excited when she saw what he was doing. She called Aderno over. The wizard was chewing on something; the peppery fumes he breathed into Hasso’s face proved it was a chunk of sausage. “Well, well,” he said, examining the numbers. “Those aren’t what we use, but you’ll follow ours, all right.”
    To the Lenelli, one was a horizontal slash. Ten looked like a plus sign. A hundred was a square with a horizontal line through the middle. If you put the symbol for three - three horizontal slashes piled on one another - to the left of the symbol for ten, it meant thirty. If you put it to the right of the symbol for ten, it meant thirteen. The Lenelli didn’t use a zero. The system struck Hasso as better than Roman numerals, not as good as Arabic.
    To show him how many people Drammen held, Aderno needed to teach him one more symbol: a square divided into quarters by vertical and horizontal lines. The wizard seemed impressed when he didn’t boggle at the idea of a thousand.
    Drammen, by what Aderno wrote, held somewhere between thirty and forty thousand people. With a patronizing smile, Aderno asked, “And how many people in the town you come from, Hasso Pemsel?”
    Hasso had to think about his answer. He took the stick from the wizard and wrote the symbol for four and the symbol for a thousand. Aderno’s smile got wider. Then Hasso wrote the symbol for a thousand again, to the right of the first quartered square.
    Velona blinked. Aderno stopped smiling. “No, that can’t be right,” he said impatiently. “You have written the numbers for four thousand thousand - we would say four million. But that is obviously impossible.”
    “Four million, ja,” Hasso said. “That’s about how many people there are in Berlin.” At least till the Russians get through with it, he thought glumly. God only knows how many they’ll leave alive.
    “You can’t expect me to believe you,” Aderno said.
    “You asked me. Now you don’t like the answer,” Hasso said.
    “Only a madman would like it,” the wizard insisted. “No one could keep four million people fed. The idea is ridiculous. Even if by some miracle you could, their filth would pile up in mountains. You must be lying.”
    Hasso swung the Schmeisser’s muzzle toward him. “What did you say?” he asked softly. “You may want to think about what comes out of your mouth.”
    Aderno had the courage of his convictions. “Do not act as if your