It frightened him that he could understand them so well—but the Guardian had been right, he was one of their kind.
If the Guardian was real.
Real or not, Orgoru resolved to hold fast to one bit of delusion—his image of himself as tall and lean, graceful and cultured, with a noble brow and wise face. When he stopped to think about it, he knew he was only a plump, dowdy, very ordinary looking man—but he didn’t intend to stop to think about it if he didn’t have to. His unthinking image of himself as aristocratic, would help him become the magistrate, then the reeve, that he knew he could be!
When the Protector was overthrown.
As they came back into the city, though, another shock awaited him. Why he should have thought the women wouldn’t look any different, when the men did, he didn’t know—but they were different indeed, tall, short, fat, cadaverous, lumpen and plain, with moon-faces and horse-faces and squints and warts. They cried welcome to the men as they came into the palace, and some ran to embrace their lovers. Orgoru watched in shock until one tall, rawboned woman came hurrying up to him and, in the voice of Countess Gilda, cried, “Welcome back! Oh, I feared so for your safety, for your life, my prince!” She threw her arms about him, but Orgoru stood frozen, trying to reconcile the beautiful countess of his delusion with this long-faced, lantern jawed woman.
Gilda thrust herself away, staring up at him in alarm. “Why are you so cold, my love?”
With a stabbing pain, Orgoru felt the image of beauty wrenched away from him—but he looked into Gilda’s eyes, those huge, limpid, lovely dark blue eyes, and knew that one element of her beauty, at least, was real.
Perhaps her conversation was, too, her intelligence and her wit. His pulse quickened with the thought, but he still couldn’t bring himself to really embrace this tall, ungainly creature. Silently, he thanked all good fortune that he hadn’t started a real affair, and certainly that he hadn’t married yet!
Orgoru prowled the halls of the palace in the early light of the next morning, pausing to listen at every door, prepared to explain, if anyone came upon him, that he had waked in the middle of the night and couldn’t sleep again, so he had gone to take a walk and try to regain sleepiness. Part of the story, at least, was true.
As he stopped by Countess Gilda’s door, he heard sobbing. At once, compassion flowed, and all his revulsion fled. He tapped on her door. The sobbing stopped.
“It’s Orgoru,” he called softly.
There was only one sobbing gasp from within. “Orgoru only,” he explained, “not the Prince—Not to you—now.”
There was a burst of footsteps, and the door flew open; he found himself staring into Gilda’s tear-streaked face. She looked him up and down with a look of disbelief. “You? Orgoru? But … but how…”
“This is how I really am,” Orgoru told her gently. “Look closely at my face! Do you see nothing of the Orgoru you knew?”
“Some… something,” she managed.
“I woke crying out yesterday morning,” Orgoru told her. “May I come in?”
“Yes! At once! Before anyone sees!” Gilda pulled him into the chamber and shut the door quickly, then turned and leaned against it, bosom heaving—and Orgoru realized that not all the delusion had been false. “How … how did you…”
“I dreamed of all the worst wrongs of my life being righted,” Orgoru told her. “I dreamed of an old man who called himself ‘the Wizard of Peace,’ and made me see myself as I really am—only Orgoru, the son of peasants. I nearly fled back into madness then, but he had shown me enough that was good about myself that I held on to sanity.”
“I, too!” Gilda gasped. “I dreamed of other boys and girls treating me kindly, including me in their games, even dancing with me when I grew to young womanhood! I found I dared to see myself as I was, and not shrink in disgust!”
Orgoru nodded. “Then the Wizard told me I could earn real nobility by rescuing the common people from this dictator who rules with with an iron rod, the Protector.”
“I … I too,” Gilda said, her tone faltering.
Orgoru looked into those large, fine eyes, and realized that she wasn’t so plain after all—even though her face was streaked, and her eyes red with tears. “Brace yourself. None of the others look as you have seen them. King Longar is short and fat.”
“How … how did I look to you?”
“Shorter than you are, voluptuous, and stunning in your beauty.” Orgoru knew that lies wouldn’t serve. He took a step closer, frowning. “But looking closely, looking into your eyes, I see that not all of that beauty was a dream.”
Gratitude flashed across her face, chased out by a sardonic grimace. “I know what I am, Orgoru. I’ve looked in my mirror. Don’t lie to me, for it did not.”
Yes, there was something of her old wit left there, and certainly … “Your intelligence is as great as I remember it.”
“Oh, is it really! And what man ever found a woman attractive for intelligence?”
“I,” Orgoru told her truthfully, “and most of the men here, I think.”
She stared, hope rising in her eyes.
“We all of us value wit, at least,” he told her, “men and women alike.”
“Then there was some shred of truth in that delusion,” she whispered.
“Some,” he told her. “When the shock of seeing the others for the first time wore off, I watched them move, watched them dance. Their gracefulness is no illusion, nor their posture and bearing. They have all learned to move like the aristocrats in the magic pictures, and that grace remains. It’s learned, but it’s there.”
“Then the Wizard spoke truly? We can learn to be real lords and ladies?”
“Our land’s equivalent, at least,” Orgoru told her, “reeves and their wives.”
Suddenly she almost collapsed, and he sprang to catch her, to hold her up. “Give me my madness again!” she sobbed into his chest.
“We shall have to earn it,” he told her sadly, “and to earn it, we have to become what we only played at being.”
Her body firmed; the tears dwindled, and she looked up at him. “We shall, then,” she said, with the same iron resolution that now made up his core. “I may never be able to be beautiful, but I shall become a lady in fact.”
“You already are,” he whispered.
That afternoon, Lord Saunders woke from his nap sobbing. Orgoru was prowling the halls and came upon him before he had been alone long. The two men commiserated, then resolved to hurry the overthrow along, so that they could earn their return to madness.
The next morning, Lady Rijora awoke weeping, and Gilda went to comfort her. King Longar woke crying out that afternoon, and Saunders and Orgoru comforted him. Thus, one by one and ten a day, the deluded folk awoke to sanity, and longed for madness.
By the end of the month, everyone in Voyagend had dreamed of the Wizard, and the Wizard had assured them all that the giant would tell them how to overthrow the Protector. They welcomed Gar and his companions back into the city, albeit nervously, and while he was recovering from the exertion of curing them, they spent a nervous night trying to socialize in their old style, but all very obviously trying not to feel uncomfortable with these plain, drab, ordinary-looking people whom reality had shown them. Toward the end of the evening, Miles found Dirk and said, “Master Dirk…”
Dirk gave him a warning glare. Miles sighed; the man was fight. “Dirk, we must do something, and quickly! They’re so repulsed by the sight of one another that we may very well see them trying to go mad again!”