A Wizard and a Warlord

17

The whole company was silent, shocked at the suddenness of it, and they all heard the bodyguard say, very clearly, “Malachi was too careful. You weren’t.”

A captain found words. “Wh-why?”

“He led the troops who conquered my village.” The bodyguard lifted his head, glaring around. “All right, they’d cast me out, but they were mine, damn it! That’s when I joined the Scarlet Company.”

“Grab him!” the captain roared.

The bodyguard brought his spear to guard. “You really want to?” He turned to the captain. “Come and take me! But remember—I may not be the only one here from the Scarlet Company. I was waiting my moment—who else?”

The whole company stood, wavering, irresolute. Gar could feel fear balancing outrage, saw each bandit glancing at the men to left and right of him, saw the twitch of the head as each tried to look behind without others seeing—and felt the moment when fear won out and men eased back just a little.

The bodyguard felt it, too. He turned, stalking over to Crel and drawing his dagger. Crel braced himself, but the bodyguard, jabbed his spear in the ground, took hold of the rope, and sawed through it with half a dozen quick strokes. Crel tottered and almost fell against him.

The bodyguard hoisted him over a shoulder and took up his spear again. He glared around him and said, “We’re going now. If you try to follow, be careful who walks beside you.” Then he turned and strode away into the woods.

There was a collective intake of breath, of leaning forward, of waiting for an order—but every man glanced at those beside him again, then turned to the captain.

The captain glared darkly after the two men of the Scarlet Company but said nothing.. After a little while, he turned and stalked back to his tent.

The men relaxed, began to talk to one another in hushed tones, to mill about. Gar gazed about him, seeming blank and confused, but listening intently for any mention of the Scarlet Company, anyone thinking it was his duty to draw a dagger.

He heard no one. The bluff had worked.

Of course, the bodyguard hadn’t known it was a bluff.

Alea absorbed it all, dazed. Finally she thought, Gar, what are we doing here?

I’ve been wondering that myself, Gar answered. I’ll meet you tonight and we can talk it over face to face.

Meet me? How? You’re a soldier!

Men are beginning to leave already, Gar told her, just packing up their gear and walking off into the forest. Nobody seems to care about stopping them.

Without General Malachi, the whole army is falling apart, Alea thought, still numb.

Certainly after Ivack tried to hold it together. No one wants to be the third-time charm. I can certainly walk away after dark. Where shall we rendezvous?

I’m at the Inn of the North Star, Alea told him. Let me know when you get here and I’ll come out to meet you in the common room.

She had a few hours before he came, though. Dazed, Alea made her way down to the river, then followed it upstream, stopping frequently to stare at the water as though it could reveal the mysteries of human greed and cruelty—or at least swallow them and let them dissolve. Then she walked again, letting the sound of the running water lull her, soothe her spirit. When the brook ran in among the trees, she accepted the shade and the murmuring of the leaves as balm. She knelt on a rock and dipped a hand in the stream, letting it run through her fingers. At last she stood up with a sigh—and saw Evanescent.

“You meant it, didn’t you?” With no one nearby to hear, she could speak her thoughts aloud. “That you are the Scarlet Company.”

Us, and all of you, Evanescent replied, even you newly come, for it seems you have joined them now.

“Why not?” Alea demanded, somewhat irked. “They’re the only ones doing anything to cleanse this planet of the evil ones!”

So say many, but not until they have encountered that evil themselves, Evanescent replied. We remind them, that is all—remind them of evil, and of their dedication to their fellows.

Alea frowned. “You mean you’re the ones who keep the men and women of the Scarlet Company from trying to use it as a tool to gain power and riches for themselves?”

When there are no evil and greedy men prowling the land, Evanescent explained, people can grow complacent and forget their zeal for others’ freedom, forget there is something greater than themselves, greater than any one human being or even any one family. An encounter with a strange and powerful being reminds them and renews their devotion.

“You scare them back into line,” Alea interpreted. Or overawe them and make them rededicate themselves, Evanescent said, for surely if beings of such power as our kind can forgo glory and dominion in search of a greater good, smaller and weaker beings such as people can do so, too.

“You put the fear of the gods in them.”

The awe, perhaps. Fear is the smallest part of that. Then they forget us, but the zeal remains.

“Neatly done,” Alea said with a cynical smile, “to forget you but remember your impact. What do you gain from it, though?”

A reason for living, mortal woman, the alien native replied, for we may be of different kinds and birthed by different worlds, but we are both living souls, and the welfare of one is the welfare of All—and that All overawes even we of fur and teeth, for we are also of mind and soul.

“And therefore dedicated to the goodness of all,” Alea said thoughtfully. “What do you do with those who seek to exploit and hurt their fellows, though?”

Why should we do anything? Evanescent returned. You have seen, through your mate’s eyes. The human folk will sooner or later go to the Scarlet Company, who shall train them to turn on the tyrants.

“But they can’t always be successful,” Alea objected. “Even Malachi stopped the first three assassins. And I somehow doubt that only one man in a hundred years will try to gain power.”

There are many, Evanescent admitted, but most are careless and wander in the forest alone.

Alea shuddered.

Even them we do not eat, Evanescent told her, the tone a rebuke. We bury them deeply, after the fashion of your kind—and their deaths are quick and sudden; many do not even know they have died.

“But the careful ones,” Alea inferred, “they become like General Malachi.”

Always they raise up enough hatred so that some think it worth their lives to kill them, Evanescent assured her. If they survive that, though, they grow careless sooner or later, restive at the prison of their bodyguards, and go wandering where they should not.

“And never come back.” Alea shivered. “Tell me—if they do not think to go wandering alone, do you help the idea into their minds?”

We have not had to yet, Evanescent said, with a tone of finality.

Alea knew she would gain no more information from the huge beast. Instead she said, “I would rather not forget this meeting. You’re a remarkable creature and have given me an amazing experience.”

You shall remember when you have left this planet, Evanescent promised.

A bird trilled overhead, pouring out such a volume of liquid notes that Alea had to look up, heart filled with the exaltation of the beauty of the music. Then the bird finished and she looked down with regret at the maze of leaves and trunks opposite her. It was tempting to go wandering, to lose herself in the emptiness and solitude of that foliage and forget humanity with its striving and cheating and vanity for a while—but Gar would be coming to the inn and she had to meet him there. With a sigh of regret and a head filled with the chaotic events of the day, but a heart curiously soothed and light, she turned to follow the river back into town.

Gar came in the evening when the common room was still full, men and women chatting and laughing as they finished their ale. A few had risen and gone home. The fire was burning low and the evening was winding down.

Alea surveyed them with exasperation. The fools! They had no idea how close they had come to disaster—and they didn’t care. Didn’t care about the gallant young man who had saved them, either, or the savage beating he’d taken.

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.”

They stood side by side, watching the stars as something began to blot them out in an ever-widening circle. Then it wasn’t a blot of darkness anymore, but a spaceship descending with its lights out.

Alea watched it fall, feeling a little angry again that Gar had salved his feelings by pretending that a secret society of assassins could be a government. She was tempted to tell him, out of sheer spite, what she had learned in those last few minutes they had been at the inn, when she had overheard the thoughts of the innkeeper’s wife, one of her serving maids, and four other village women. They had locked the door of an inner room and, as they stitched and knitted, discussed the afternoon’s assassination and whether or not the Scarlet Company had stayed true to its ideals. She had kept track of the discussion as she had climbed the hillside beside Gar in silence, and had eavesdropped as they decided that the Company had indeed remained pure, so that no intervention would be needed.

She decided she wouldn’t tell him—he would just pretend that it was only one more part of his informal government, anyway. It would have been satisfying to see the look on his face until he managed to think of that but she felt petty even considering the idea. Besides, Gar didn’t really need to know that the founders had set up a second secret society to keep watch on the first that the Scarlet Company might be watching over the people, but that the Indigo Company was watching the Scarlet.