“Overthrow!” Ciletha gasped. “Is it really necessary to overthrow the Protector?”
Gar calmed amazingly, turning to her with a gentle smile. “Absolutely necessary, young woman. The Protector is a dictator ruling an entrenched bureaucracy, and neither will give up a jot of power if it can possibly help it. Indeed, both will fight to their very deaths to hold on to every bit of power they have.”
“But they have given us safety and kept us fed and housed!”
“Yes.” Miles nodded, seeing Ciletha’s point. “Surely we can keep what’s good in this government!”
“Why, you can indeed,” Gar said, looking at his guide with new respect. “You’ll have to change the masters—the Protector and his reeves, at least, and maybe the magistrates and inspectors-general, too—but you can keep the actual machinery of running the country, the ‘bureaucracy’ as we call it. It’s so entrenched that you probably couldn’t eliminate it, anyway—the local village mayor would ask the city mayor what he should do, and the city mayor would ask the county’s governor, and so forth.”
“So why not keep calling them magistrates and reeves? But you can choose who they’ll be,” Dirk said earnestly. “Everyone gets to say who they want for the post, and the person who gets the most voices, gets the job, too.”
“You would choose the Protector in similar fashion,” Gar added, “though you shouldn’t call him ‘Protector’; he might develop ideas about seizing power. No, call him ‘president’ or ‘premier’ or ‘prime minister’ or ‘First Citizen’ or some such, and give him only the power to carry out whatever policy the reeves decide on, when they’re all gathered together.”
Dirk nodded. “When they go home, though, each reeve has to answer to a gathering of all his magistrates, and each magistrate has to let the people of his town or village tell him what they want him to do.”
“Is it possible?” Ciletha breathed.
“It is! I can feel it! It is!” Miles squeezed her hand.
“But why ‘him’ and ‘he’?” Ciletha asked, frowning. “Why might not women be magistrates?”
Miles turned to stare at her, stunned by the outrageousness of the idea.
“No reason at all,” Dirk said promptly, “except that the people have been ruled by men so long that it will take them a generation or two to get used to the idea. By the time you’re fifty, though, you should be able to run for office. Probably won’t be elected, but your daughter might be.”
Ciletha gave him a wistful smile. “If I ever have a daughter.”
“You must!” Miles declared, and caught her hand, then suddenly turned grave. “It will be very dangerous, though. If the Protector’s spies catch us before we overthrow him, we’ll be tortured and executed.”
“It’s not for the fainthearted,” Dirk agreed. “Is it worth your life?”
Ciletha and Miles looked at one another, hands clasped. Then both cried, “Yes!” together.
That decided, they found a trail and followed it to a spot where a huge boulder thrust up amidst the brush and trees, overgrown with lichens and vines. Miles noticed squared-off corners and decided it must be a stone left by the city’s builders. Dirk hid him behind it, then climbed to a branch overhanging the trail. Gar stepped into the brush on the other side of the path and disappeared.
“You won’t hurt him, will you?” Ciletha said to Miles in a shaking whisper.
Miles felt a stab of jealousy, but assured her, “No, lass, for your sake alone, I’d not hurt him. As to Dirk and Gar, they need him alive and well for their own reasons.”
“Could he truly become the first false magistrate?” Ciletha wondered.
“Hist!” Miles laid a hand on her arm, tensing and looking back along the trail.
The shouting had stopped abruptly when the mob came to the edge of the woods, but they were muttering to one another so loudly, and cracking so many twigs as they went, that there was no danger of missing them. They came into a patch of moonlight, ungainly, plump men, or ones so scrawny they seemed almost cadavers, oddly graceful in their finery. They crept past the boulder with loud shushing of one another and a veritable racket of crushed sticks and dried brush, Orgoru in their midst. Suddenly he stopped, frowning about him.
“Go on, Orgoru!” hissed the Earl of March.
“Pass me.” Orgoru stared into the bushes, frowning. “I’ll bring up the rear.”
“As you will,” the earl grumbled, and went on, beckoning the men behind him to follow.
Orgoru didn’t, though. He stood frowning off into the brush, and Ciletha wondered what he had heard. Suddenly he came to himself, realizing that the mob had moved on down the trail. He turned to follow—and Gar stepped out of the underbrush, catching him with one arm across his chest, pinioning Orgoru’s arm and clapping a pad of cloth over his mouth. Dirk leaped out to catch Orgoru’s flailing free hand and press something small against the wrist. Orgoru tried to scream through the cloth, then went suddenly limp.
Ciletha dashed from the underbrush. “Is he … is he …?” “Asleep.” Gar hoisted the unconscious Orgoru to his shoulder. “Only asleep, lass. Frightened, I’m sure, but not hurt one bit. We can’t cure him here, though, where the others are sure to come back. Let’s find a cave.”
They found one halfway around the city wall, where a dead pine had fallen against another huge leftover building-block. Dirk cut away inner dry branches with his sword, then cut fresh boughs from another tree to make a pallet. Gar laid Orgoru on it, and Ciletha crowded close to see for herself that his color was good, and his chest rising and falling. She relaxed with a sigh of relief—Orgoru did indeed look as though he were asleep.
“Watch if you wish, but don’t talk.” Gar sat down crosslegged beside Orgoru and closed his eyes.
“He’s not kidding about keeping quiet,” Dirk said. “What he’s going to do is very hard, and takes every ounce of concentration he can muster. If you don’t want him to hurt Orgoru by accident, be absolutely quiet—and if you can’t, go take a walk until Gar’s done.”
“I shall be a very mouse,” Ciletha promised.
But the steadfastness of the gaze she fixed on Orgoru lanced Miles with jealousy. As quietly as he could, he crept out of the lean-to and went to walk in the night, trying to calm his heart and find peace for his soul. But he couldn’t help glancing back—and saw Dirk standing by the boulder, watching for the mob. It struck Miles as a good idea, and an excellent excuse for staying away from Ciletha and Orgoru. He began to prowl about the lean-to, a self-appointed sentry.
Little Orgoru tripped, stumbled into the table. His mother’s only vase crashed to the floor. “What was that?” she cried, and came running. Orgoru flinched away from her, trying to make himself as small as possible, knowing the beating that was coming…
But she only said, “Oh! My vase!” and seemed to wilt, as though all the spirit had gone out of her. She sat down heavily on the bench, threw her apron over her head, and began to cry.
Orgoru stared, unable to believe his good fortune. This wasn’t how he remembered it (but how could he remember something that hadn’t even happened yet?). Surely she would beat him when she was done crying! But her sobs went on and on, tearing his heart, and he dared to creep closer, finally to touch her and stammer, “I-I’m sorry, Mama.”
Her hand reached out; he shied, but it only rested lightly on his head. “It’s all right, all right, Orgoru,” she said through her tears. “It was an accident, an accident. These things happen; vases break.” Then she wailed into her apron, a whole new torrent of tears.
Orgoru couldn’t bear her grief. He clasped her hand with both of his own. “Don’t cry, Mama. I’ll make you a new one.” He did, too, scooping the clay from the riverbank, molding it with his hands, and drying it in the sun. Something within him knew that it looked a fright, but he preened with the pride of accomplishment anyway, and his mother was delighted. “Oh, what a wonderful boy! How thoughtful of you! How pretty it is!” It must have been his intentions that pleased her, though, not the vase itself. He wondered why she never put a flower in it, but when he grew up, he realized that not having been fired, the vase would have melted with the water. By that time, though, he had made a few pennies from odd jobs, and from pelts sold after hunting season, and had bought her a new vase anyway. But she packed the old one away for her memories.