"Even so. And, too, I have come to believe that folk should be governed by their own consent and consensus, by discussing matters till they can agree, following the example of the holy hermits who abide nearest them. Thus they would live according to the common law they create together, and by the Commandments of God."
"Revolutionary!"
" 'Tis a brave notion, and devoutly to be wished." Frisson was pensive.
"But how could it come to be, Friar Ignatius? Such a transformation in people's thoughts could not be worked in a single night, nor even a decade."
"Even so," the monk agreed. "If it can come about at all, it will be by the patient example of men and women dedicated to God - and I do not, of course, believe it can come to be completely or perfectly as I see it. Only in Heaven may we be perfect, one by one or all together. Still, I do think we can hope to improve greatly as the years roll. 'Twill be a long process, and slow."
"But even in its early phases, people would want a better government," I said. "You're giving them the idea that they can expect to be treated as worthwhile human beings in their own right."
"But of course," Friar Ignatius murmured, "for that is what they are. Every soul is infinitely precious, Master Saul - precious to God, and therefore should be precious to anyone who calls himself Christian."
"Should be," I noted. "And, of course, there's the minor problem of whether or not your ideas will work unless everybody tries them all at once - but even a small dose would be enough to bother the bureaucrats. They see people as numbers, not souls."
"A fascinating notion." Friar Ignatius frowned. "So you can understand, Master Saul, why the queen would wish me gone."
"Oh, sure! She wants people to believe they're stuck being whatever they were born as - and if they were born serfs and peasants, as the vast majority of them were, it's not going to do them any good to try to be anything different, or to even protest against what the authorities tell them to do."
"Which is to say, that they have no free will, not even such lesser forms," Friar Ignatius agreed.
Interesting that he thought social mobility and social action were minor. "Of course, it is awfully difficult to become anything you're not born to - and society does everything it can to keep you in place. "
"Difficult," the monk agreed, "but not impossible. Our birth and our talents, and the moral teachings given us by our parents and clergy-these are among those things given us, over which we have no control. Still, a soul who strives, and who uses wisely what she or he is given, may yet do great things."
I frowned. "How about if he's born with a really vicious temper, a lust for power, and a sex drive that just won't quit?"
Friar Ignatius shuddered. "I have heard of such men-nay, I have
-ict them. But even one so accursed may win to Heaven through devotion to God, and adherence to His Commandments." That, of course, was what really mattered, to him - free will was there so we could choose to sin or not to sin, to fly or to burn. I was seized with the vision of the pinball machine of life, with the balls and the laws of force and motion being determinism, and when and how I hit the flappers being free will. "I think we should tilt." All three of them looked at me as if I'd lost my marbles. "What did you say, Wizard?
"Uh, nothing," I said quickly. "Strategy for the revolution. How long before we get to the mainland, do you think?" Only a day and a night, as it turned out. There were some storms with some very odd timing, boiling up out of a clear blue sky - but Frisson was clearheaded again, and we had some idea what we were fighting. I fished through my sheaf of parchments and handed him a couple of odes in praise of sunshine, and he improved on them as he recited, and for some reason, the foul weather blew over almost as quickly as it had come.
Still, it did seem kind of odd to me that the queen should let us make it back to the mainland with no worse trouble than that. I mentioned this to Friar Ignatius right after we had hauled the boat past the high-tide mark and started hiking inland. "It may be that she has little time to spare for us," he told me, "even though we may be the greatest challenge yet to her throne."
"Aye," Gilbert agreed. "If the Spider King and the Gremlin have done as they promised, she will be far too busy to spare us much attention.
"Good point." I turned to the nearest large spider - we were hiking through a marshy meadow, and the arachnids seemed to be everywhere; the stiff grass was ideal for mooring webs. "Tell the Spider King we're back, will you?" I said. "And we'd like to know what's going on." My buddies glanced sidelong at me as if they were wondering about my sanity again, but they'd met the Spider King, too, all except for Gruesome and Friar Ignatius, so they kept their peace. Which was very wise - the spider was busy mending the rim of her web, but she turned and scampered straightaway back to the center - and disappeared. Friar Ignatius stared at it for a few seconds. Then he whipped his gaze up to me, stared for a few seconds longer, then glanced back at the web.
Gilbert squared his shoulders and cleared his throat. "There is small time to debate," he said. " 'Tis long and far to Allustria, and we have only our legs."
He took the lead, and we filed off after him.
About half an hour later, we were coming up to a stand of trees, just to the right of our path, a really splendid web was strung between two saplings, four feet in diameter, with a spider whose body was the size of an old-fashioned dollar. We glanced at it in admiration, then looked again.
Woven into the web were runes. They spelled out, "Gaze."
"Gaze?" I frowned, staring. "Gaze at what?"
"Thus." Friar Ignatius beckoned, and we turned aside from the path, heading for the sound of a brook that had been paralleling our path for the last few minutes. The monk scouted along its edge until he found a small pool that had formed between some rocks. "Here, poet," he said. "Craft a verse that would tune a pool to the king's mind."
"Uh," I think I pulled out the sheaf and riffled through, then yanked a slip. "Here, Frisson!"
The poet pursed his lips, absorbing his own verse again, then spouted it out, with improvements:
I did a double take, but he was right - "television" was Latin for "seeing at a distance," though not quite in the way my culture meant it. I looked down at the pool, almost daring it to show me something. It clouded and darkened, then cleared, but stayed dark, a deep indigo - and in its depths, images formed. My gaze locked onto them; I couldn't have forced myself to look away if I'd wanted to. And, of course, I didn't want to; to say the least they were compelling.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
We saw a mob of peasants beating up a squad of soldiers in a village square. It was unbelievable, until the pool showed us just one villager swinging a cudgel down at a soldier. The men-at-arms stabbed at him with a pike-but the peasant's cudgel whacked right on the haft behind the head, and the shaft broke.
"The Gremlin!" I breathed. After all, our perverse friend specialized in making things break down at the crucial moment. Admittedly, he was better with high-tech devices-the more complicated they are, the more things can go wrong - but he was managing pretty well with what he had.
The battle disappeared, and another army swam into view - but in this one, the soldiers were fighting among themselves. A knight rode about the fray, trying to knock combatants apart with a mace, but his horse tripped, and he disappeared into a melee of flailing arms. The images grew larger and larger, floating out past the edges of the pool, till I could see an overturned kettle next to the ashes of a campfire. The kettle was empty. Then the fighting soldiers swam back in, growing smaller and smaller until I was looking at an overhead view of the churning mass of soldiers. Suddenly they streaked past me, and the images expanded again, until I found myself looking down into a trio of farm wagons. They were filled with hay. Apparently, the quartermaster had bollixed up the order, sending horse food instead of people food, and the soldiers were starving.