Thesis and antithesis, Gar’s voice said inside her head. Brutality begets brutality. The tyrant spawns his own assassin.
Alea looked up and saw him lounging against a bark-covered pillar, looking somewhat like a tree trunk himself in his brown tunic and tan leggins. She came over to him and said, aloud, “You took long enough!”
“All my life,” he agreed. “How about a flagon?” She was glad to sit down—it hadn’t been the rejoinder she’d expected.
He brought two mugs of ale. Alea sipped hers, then asked, “Any reason for us to stay?”
“I don’t think so,” Gar said. “Let’s find a nice bare-topped hill and see how the town looks in the moonlight.”
Alea lifted her mug in salute, started to drink, then froze, eyes losing focus.
Gar frowned, instantly sifting the thoughts that babbled around him. He shook his head, bemused. “Women’s complaint,” Alea told him. “They don’t need my help, though. Drink up.”
They did, then went out the door together and strolled out of town. They were silent as they climbed up through the trees, listening for any bandit who might seek to steal the simpleton’s woman, but all was quiet; if there were any outlaws nearby, they were very subdued.
When they reached the summit, they looked across the town to the hill beyond. From this angle, they could see the tiny campfires on the plateau.
Finally Gar broke the silence. “I hate to admit it, but I’ve found a society without a government—or at least, nothing that I would call a government and they don’t need me.”
“It’s galling, I know,” Alea said, “but I didn’t tell you about my day.”
Gar turned to her quickly. “You found something in the books?”
“Yes,” Alea said, “but more in the town. When I visited the sick with the priestess this afternoon, a dying man recruited me into the Scarlet Company to fill his place.”
Gar stared. Alea especially enjoyed the way his mouth opened and closed without any words. Finally he managed to ask, “Why? What did he know about you?”
“He was one of the people I talked to when I was trying to raise the alarm,” Alea explained. “He told his cell about me, and they told the other cells—and he found out nearly every step I took. He knew I’d become a priestess and was visiting the sick. He decided I had the good of the people at heart and sent me to a friend of his to be inducted properly into the Company.”
“What … sort of inductance?” Gar asked, his voice strangled.
“Lecture and discussion—mostly lecture, actually. The Scarlet Company’s history and structure, how to meet the rest of my cell, how to call for help if I need it or if someone else does—everything to make me function within the organization.”
“It is organized, then?”
“Very much so—but it’s decentralized,” Alea explained. “They’ve divided the land into nineteen districts, each taking care only of itself and keeping down any bullies who try to take over. The local chapter was on the verge of calling in a couple of other districts to help them when one of their agents went with us to the ruins of the youths’ village and found Crel. She recruited him into the Scarlet Company, and you know the rest.”
“So it wouldn’t be terribly easy for any one person to take over the Scarlet Company and use it as an instrument of conquest,” Gar said slowly, “not if he could only give orders within his own district.”
Alea nodded. “If any agent tried to gain power, another province, or several, would unite to bring him down.”
“One of their own?” Gar asked skeptically. “Especially one of their own,” Alea confirmed. “They’re sworn to serve the public and chastise bullies, after all, and any one of them who tried to become a tyrant would be a traitor.”
“That would help,” Gar said slowly, “but I could think of ways around it.”
“No one else has,” Alea said, “they think.”
“Think?” Gar asked with raised eyebrows.
“Twice, some agent has come up with a scheme to unite all the districts under one supreme cell,” Alea told him. “Their cell-mates stopped talking to them, and so did everyone else in the Scarlet Company.”
“Ostracized,” Gar said, impressed. “Cut off, cut out.”
“But not killed,” Alea reminded him. “One of them retaliated by organizing the bandits the way General Malachi did and conquered a village. Then they killed him.”
“No difficulty finding a volunteer that time?”
“None.”
“Still no guarantee.” Gar looked out over the town. “It seems to work,” Alea retorted. “It has, for centuries.”
“Yes, it has.” Gar turned back to her and she saw that he was grinning.
“You’re happy about this!” she accused. “Delighted,” Gar assured her. “I have been put to the test of my convictions.”
“Yes.” Alea nodded. “You’ve found a people whose political system suits them.”
“Their lack of a political system, rather,” Gar said, “but it does protect their civil rights, as long as they’re content with Neolithic village culture.”
“Which they are, as long as they have advanced medicine and farming methods,” Alea said. “I’ll admit that this couldn’t work even in Midgard, where they need to be able to call all the able-bodied men to war on a day’s notice—but this system avoids war.”
“It could never work for a modern society of metropolises, industry, and international commerce, of course,” Gar said. “That calls for large-scale organization and complicated ways of coordinating people—what we usually think of as government.”
“The Scarlet Company would be killing a would-be tyrant every day,” Alea agreed, “and the government would very quickly learn how to hunt down the Company members and jail them, then execute them.”
“But these people’s ancestors made sure they wouldn’t develop that way,” Gar said, “and it suits them—as long as they’re content to live in villages and small towns and never travel much except for a year or two in their youth.”
Alea nodded, looking out over the town, where lights were beginning to go out. “It stays in balance. It works.” She turned to Gar, unable to resist needling him. “Of course, the individual villages and towns are functioning democracies.”
“Very primitive democracies,” Gar protested, “and I had nothing to do with setting them up. Besides, my guiding principle has always been to make sure the government suits the people and the society, and this one definitely does.”
“That principle is being put to the test,” Alea said with wicked glee. “How are you rating? Will you pass?”
“I shall leave this planet tonight,” Gar averred, “without trying to make any changes.” He pulled up the tab of his shirt collar and spoke into it. “Come and get us, Herkimer, would you?”
“Descending,” the collar answered in a thin and tinny voice.
Alea looked upward, waiting for the spaceship to come into view. “Their form of democracy does suit them, Gar.”
Gar nodded. “Especially since the assassins have become the government.”
Alea turned to him in shock. “They have not! The Scarlet Company is sworn to prevent government!”
“And thereby protects the people from the worst of the bandits,” Gar pointed out, “and from powermongers in the villages—and in the process, they resolve disputes that go beyond the village councils’ power and would turn into blood feuds if no one intervened.”
“The sages do that!”
“But the Scarlet Company calls them in,” Gar reminded her. “Admittedly, it’s a minimal form of government, but it’s more complex than it seems, requiring teamwork between the priests, the priestesses, the sages, the village councils—but the center is the Scarlet Company. In fact, I find it hard to believe a balance like that can work without open coordination—but it does.” He shrugged. “I certainly have no business trying to tell them that it doesn’t.”