They stopped, but it was too late to withdraw. The men were coming to them, carrying clubs and pitchforks. They looked mean. They wore black tunics. Nona didn’t want to use her magic, but if the men attacked she would have to hurl a fireball. What were despot men doing here in a theow village like this?
I will project caution to their minds, Seqiro said, also in thought, which was always his way. And fear if necessary.
The men came to stand before Darius. “What’s your business here, stranger?” one demanded.
“I have an entertainment troupe,” Darius explained. Nona knew that he was a stickler for honesty, but they had indeed become such a troupe. “Our maiden plays music and dances, and our horse is trained to do tricks. We also have a strange Monster from Afar. We ask only pennies from the audience, to defray our meager expenses.”
“Mister, where you been the last month?” the man demanded. “Didn’t you know there’s been a revolution?”
“I have been isolated, far from here, with my troupe,” Darius said. “What is this about a revolution?”
“Some bitch brought the anima,” the man said. “The current changed, and now we can’t do magic. The theows got rambunctious, so we had to put the villages under martial law. You’re in theow garb; are you going to make trouble?”
“I came merely to entertain, and to earn a few pennies in payment,” Darius said. This was the truth, as far as it went; he would not have told a lie even to an enemy. “I thought my troupe would be welcomed in any village. If it is not, I will depart. I wish no trouble.”
The man looked at the other men. Seqiro projected a thought of acceptance. “Well, if you’ve got a good show, we’ll let you in. But you’ll have to be out of here by dusk.”
“I think I have a good show,” Darius said meekly.
They moved the barricade aside and let the party pass. Now the women appeared, coming out from the battered houses, their children following. They were in red. They did not look happy.
“What has happened here?” Nona demanded mentally. “Where are the theow men? This is not at all like the land I left!”
Seqiro explored the nearby minds, slowly gaining their thoughts. “The theow men were driven away,” he reported. “The women could not escape, and remain here as hostages so that the men will not attack. The despot men govern here.”
“But the despots have no magic any more!” Nona protested. “How can they govern?”
“By strength of arm and viciousness of will,” Darius explained. “They may lack magic, but so do the theows, so those with weapons and the will to use them remain dominant.”
“Oh, it wasn’t supposed to be this way!” Nona thought. “This is worse than before I brought the anima!”
“This is revolution,” Colene thought. “It’s usually this way, I think. The new order is supposed to solve all problems instantly, but it can’t, and the older order gets mean when it starts losing its power. I guess it will take a generation to settle down, when the children grow up with their magic. We should have realized that before we left here.”
“But it was peaceful when we left!” Nona reminded her.
“Because you had all the power,” Colene responded. “But then you left, and no one had magic to fill it. So instead of a new order, it’s winding down into anarchy.”
“I never realized!” Nona thought. “I should never have left! I was so selfish, thinking only of myself.”
“I don’t think so,” Darius replied. “I fear you might have been killed, as the visible agent of the revolution.”
Nona shut down her protest, realizing that this could be true. Things had taken a terrible turn.
But at the moment there were villagers to entertain. They stopped in the center of the village and proceeded with their show. Nona dismounted, and Darius made the horse do tricks, such as tapping his forehoof once for Yes and twice for No. Soon the children were laughing, and the despot men, seeing that this really was an entertainment troupe, relaxed.
“Now, horse, are you going to perform?” Darius inquired rhetorically. Seqiro tapped twice.
“Do you want any feed tonight?” Darius demanded. Seqiro tapped once.
“Do you know what you have to do to get it?” Seqiro hesitated, like a bad child, and finally tapped once. That brought the first titter. The villagers knew that the horse could not really respond so accurately, and he couldn’t be a familiar, because that magic was gone. They knew that Darius was keying the answers with some hidden signal only the horse understood. Had they known the truth, that the horse was not only reading the man’s mind but translating his words for the audience, they would have been amazed.
“What is one and one?” Darius demanded. The horse tapped twice.
“What is three and two?” The horse pondered a moment, then tapped five times.
“What is four apples and five ideas?” The horse turned his head to stare at the man, then stared at the audience, as if baffled. Then he faced away, lifted his tail, and dropped a pile of manure in front of Darius.
Even the despots were laughing then. They laughed again when Colene dashed up with a shovel and scooped up the manure. “Don’t ask him that question again,” Colene told the ringmaster as she dumped the manure in a box. “He just eats the apples, and they give him dirty ideas.” Then she grabbed her big hat and ran in front of the audience, begging for pennies. She got a number.
After the smart-horse-apple act, Nona brought out her hammer dulcimer and accompanied herself as she sang a sweet song. She was good at it, very good, because her training had been in music, and the audience loved it. Her two little hammers fairly flew across the strings, evoking the lovely music. For a second song, she removed her red tunic, to reveal a red dress beneath, with a reasonably low décolletage. Colene collected more pennies.
Then they opened the closed wagon to reveal the monster. There was a gasp of awe; this really was a strange one! Darius went into his spiel about finding this alien creature on a distant world. “Look at the people, Monster,” he ordered it. Burgess extended his three eye stalks and oriented them in the direction of the people. Colene collected a few more coins. It was of course mandatory to squeeze the audience at every stage, milking the maximum amount from each aspect of the act.
“And now, for a few more pennies, I will make the monster float,” Darius said grandly. “In air, but not like a bird.” He gestured, and Burgess took in air and pumped himself up, floating visibly above the floor of the wagon. Then he sank down again, as if exhausted—and also, the people were sure, because too much floatation would allow them to fathom the nature of the trick. Seqiro, attuned to their minds, planted the correct thoughts as the act proceeded.
It was, overall, a successful performance. Colene had a fair weight of pennies in the hat. They used these to buy some food, and then moved on out of the village, honoring the despot’s requirement that they be gone by nightfall.
But as they sought a place to camp for the night, their private dialogue was far more sober than their act for the villagers. They had expected to find a peaceful hamlet with satisfied people. Instead they had found a battle-torn remnant maintained like a prison. Was it this way all across the world of Oria? If so, the least of their concerns was whether Nona would be recognized. She knew she could not leave her world in this state. But what could she do to improve it—without sacrificing her dream of adventure on the Virtual Mode?
“I hate to say it,” Colene said. “But I guess we were insufferably naïve. We thought that all you had to do was change the animus to anima, so that the despots didn’t have any more magic, and everything would be just fine. Instead it brought chaos.” She stopped at a depression leading to a tiny river, a streamlet from a rad, one of the typical projections of the fractal world.