A Wizard in Peace

CHAPTER 2

The huge golden disk glided down in the darkness, its outer edge revolving around a stationary center that held gun turrets, sensor dishes, ports—and people. It spun down into a meadow just beyond a forest, a few miles from a town whose lights had blinked out several hours before. It sat immobile for a few minutes as its guiding computer sampled the air, analyzing it to make sure there was enough oxygen for its passengers—and no toxic gases or microbes to which they weren’t immune. The ship’s edge spun more and more slowly until it hissed to a stop; then the ship extended a ramp, and two men came down, dressed in broad-shouldered jackets over bell-sleeved shirts, and balloon trousers gathered into high boots. If worse came to worst and some poacher saw them, he wouldn’t think their clothing odd, though he might wonder about their transportation.

“The ruling class on this planet would wear robes,” Dirk grumbled. “They’re very awkward when it comes to action.” He glanced down at his loose-fitting, square-shouldered jacket and equally loose-fitting trousers, both garments gathered tight at wrists or ankles. “At least the military dresses sensibly. A little extravagantly, but sensibly.”

“Don’t let the clothes worry you, Dirk,” Gar said soothingly. “We’ll probably wind up naked, filthy, and pretending to be madmen again, anyway.”

“Well, it works on most planets,” Dirk admitted. “I keep hoping, though, Gar, that we’ll find a planet where they keep the mentally ill in decent housing of their own.”

“If they did, we wouldn’t need to be there,” Gar returned. He gazed at the countryside about him. “It looks peaceful enough, and the people certainly have their physical needs fulfilled.”

“Yeah, but once they’re well-fed and well-housed, they have time to pay attention to other needs,” Dirk sighed. “We’re a very ungrateful species as a whole, Gar.”

“Yes, we keep wanting unreasonable things like happiness and love and self-fulfillment,” Gar said with a wry smile.

“No government can guarantee those.”

“No, but the wrong kind of government can certainly block them.” Gar took a firmer grip on the pike he carried as a staff. “Let’s see which kind we’re dealing with here, shall we?” He stepped down off the ramp. Dirk followed suit, and the metal walkway slid quietly back into the huge gleaming hull.

Gar pulled a locket from inside his jacket and said into it, “Lift off, Herkimer. Wait for us in orbit.”

“Yes, Gar,” the locket replied, and the huge golden disk rose slowly, then shot up into the night until it was lost among the stars—but the locket said,-“I will keep you under surveillance whenever I can.”

“Yes. Please do,” Gar said. “After all, you never can tell when I might lose my communicator.”

“Surely, Magnus. Good luck.”

“Thank you, Herkimer. Enjoy the rest.” Gar tucked the locket away, ignoring the difference between his birth-name and his professional name, and turned toward the forest.

“Lose your communicator?” Dirk scoffed. “What difference would that make? You were born with one!”

“Yes, but it’s so demanding, sending thoughts on UHF frequencies,” Gar said mildly. “Do you think we can find a road, Dirk?”

“There’s a pathway over there that might lead to one.” Dirk pointed. “You don’t suppose we could land during the day sometime, do you?”

“Of course, if you enjoy attracting a great deal of attention.”

“Uh … no, I think not.” Dirk gave a somewhat theatrical sigh and asked, “Why do we do this, Gar? Why do we hunt down planets where the people are oppressed, just so we can go in and free them? What business is it of ours, anyway?”

“I have the perfect reason,” Gar said, somewhat smugly. “After all, I’m an aristocrat, and our occupational disease is ennui. I’m fighting off boredom. What’s your excuse?”

“Me?” Dirk looked up. “I’m an exile. You know that—you landed on my planet and linked up with me so you could start the revolution there!”

“Yes, but you’re a self-exile,” Gar corrected.

“Speak for yourself,” Dirk countered, “and I think you do. Me, I was born a serf, you know that, and when the other escaped serfs helped me get away, they recruited me into their high-tech, space-cargo company, to spend my life the way they did—working from off-planet to free my fellow serfs. But once I gained some education and became part of the modern world, I lost touch with the people I’d been born among—and lost my home.” He looked up with haunted eyes. “I have to find a new home now—and find a woman who’s enough like me to fall in love with me, which isn’t going to be easy—a lowborn lady of culture and education.”

Gar nodded, eyes gentle with sympathy. “Which is more important, Dirk? The woman, or the home?”

“I suppose it comes to the same thing in the end. How about you?”

“I?” Gar shrugged and turned away, seeming suddenly very restless, though he took only a few steps. “I have a home, at least, but I have no purpose there—no woman for me, I found that out the hard way. Besides, I’d always live in my father’s shadow.”

“But you don’t really think you’ll find another home,” Dirk said softly.

“I don’t.” Gar turned back, meeting Dirk’s gaze. “I don’t think I’ll find another home, and I don’t think I’ll find a woman who can be gentle enough to trust but strong enough not to be afraid of me. But a man has to have some purpose in life, Dirk, and if I can’t find love and can’t rear children of my own, I can at least spend my days trying to free slaves and make it possible for them to find their true mates and be happy.”

“As good a reason for staying alive as any,” Dirk said, “and better than a lot I’ve heard.” He grinned. “So we’re just like boys hanging out on a street corner in a modern city, aren’t we? Trying to find some way to pass the time while we wait for the girls to come by.”

“I suppose.” Gar smiled in spite of himself, Dirk’s optimism was catching. “And as long as we’re helping other people, we aren’t wasting our time.”

“They aren’t going to thank us, you know.”

“Yes, we found that out the hard way, didn’t we? But gratitude doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“Why, no,” Dirk said. “I suppose all we really want is to feel we’ve put the time to good use.”

Miles came panting up from the stream’s ford, careful to walk on the gravel of the road that led down to it. Dogs might pick up his trail, but no one would see footprints—and the hounds would have a long time casting about for his scent, since he had waded and swum for almost a mile.

Now, though, every muscle screamed with fatigue, and his feet felt like lumps of lead, so hard did he have to strain to lift them. His head ached, and spells of dizziness took him now and again. He had jogged all night and traveled all day, alternating between wading, swimming, and walking the gravel of the riverbank. But there was no sound of pursuit—either no one in his village had noticed his absence, everyone thinking he was at some other chore, or the foresters were being uncommonly merciful, pretending to take even longer about finding his trail than was necessary. He had heard rumors that they would do that, if they thought the fugitive’s cause right and just—and Salina’s cousin was a forester. Still, it was only a matter of time before the thrill of the chase caught them up and, sympathetic or not, they would be hunting him in earnest. They probably were already.

But he was so bone-tired and weary that he felt as though he couldn’t take another step. The thought penetrated the murk in his brain enough to make him realize that he would have to sleep soon, or he wouldn’t be able to run anymore—he would fall down where he stood, and lie unconscious till the dogs found him.

So, when he saw the haystack standing high in the field, he felt a surge of relief that washed him up onto its prickly sides and left him beached, to burrow his way in. With the last strands of consciousness leaving him, he pulled a few wisps of hay down to cover the hole he had made, then collapsed into sweet and total oblivion.

Gar and Dirk strolled down a broad road, lined with thick old trees that shaded the sides well. The traffic was light, but they were scarcely alone—there were two others going their way: a hundred feet behind, a woman driving a cart with a man walking beside it, and a hundred feet ahead, a lone man with a pack on his back and a staff in his hand. Both men wore trousers, scuffed boots, and smocks belted at the waist. The woman wore a long, dark blue skirt and a light blue blouse under a black shawl.

“Working men—farmers, at a guess,” Dirk said. The others were so far apart that there was no chance of being overheard. “I’d place the one ahead as being a tradesman of some sort,” Gar mused. “No clay on his boots.”

“Sharp eyes,” Dirk said. Then, a little more loudly as another traveler passed them, “No, the storm clouds are too far ahead—it won’t rain before sunset.”

“Oh, I think it might,” Gar said, equally loudly. “Stiff breeze in our faces. It’ll bring the thunderheads sooner.”

The carter looked up, startled, and frowned at them as he went by before he had to turn back to tend to his team of oxen. “Not too hard saying what he is,” Gar muttered. “Fullscale wagon crowded with barrels—he’s a delivery boy for a vineyard.”

“Or for the wine seller,” Dirk said. “Of course, those barrels could hold ale.”

“They could. At least we’re both agreed he’s not the merchant himself.”

“Of course—not well-enough dressed.” Dirk nodded at another man with a wagon, a hundred feet farther down the road and coming toward them. “Now, he’s a merchant.”

Gar looked; the man wore tight-fitting trousers and a tunic, like the carter, but his were clearly of better fabric and livelier color—deep blue for the trousers and light blue for the tunic. More importantly, he wore an open coat over them, and it was of brocade. “Yes, I’d say he’s a bit more affluent, but still has to be on the road with a wagon. Besides, he has hirelings.”

Two other wagons followed, each with a driver wearing the usual earth-toned trousers and belted tunic.

“O-ho! Here comes somebody important!” Dirk pointed. Around a curve in the road ahead came a small closed carriage, square and Spartan, painted a somber black. Before it rode two men on horseback with another two behind, dressed alike in dark red jackets and trousers with broad-brimmed, flat hats of the same color. They carried spears stepped in sockets attached to their saddles and wore swords and daggers very obviously at their belts.

“Soldiers, wearing the livery Herkimer used as models for our costumes.” Gar frowned. “Presumably, ours being brown only means we work for a different boss.”

“Yes, but ours isn’t here, and theirs is inside the carriage,” Dirk pointed out. “This might be a good time to see what the backs of the roadside trees look like.”

“I think we’d be a little obvious,” Gar replied. “We’d better brazen it out. I hope they speak our language.”

The thought hit Dirk with a shock. “My lord, we did come down here unprepared, didn’t we?”

“Not hard, when we didn’t have any information,” Gar said dryly. “But their ancestors spoke Terran Standard, so there’s no reason to think they don’t.”

“Yeah, and it’ll give us a way of guessing how restrictive their culture is,” Dirk said, smiling. “The worse their accent, the more permissive the culture—the closer to Standard, the more their authorities insist everything be done just right.”

“We should be in an excellent position to study the authorities,” Gar said, “considering who’s in the coach.”

As they passed, the soldiers saluted them. Each held his arm straight out to the side and bent up at the elbow, hand a flat blade. Gar and Dirk copied the gesture, careful to smile no more than the real soldiers did. As the coach passed, they caught a glimpse of a man in his thirties with a square black hat, and a robe that matched the color of his soldiers’ livery. He had spectacles on his nose and was trying to study some papers in spite of the coach’s lurching and swaying. Then the rear guards were saluting, Dirk and Gar were returning the salutes, and the coach was rumbling off down the road.

“Well, we passed the first test,” Dirk sighed.

“Now we know how the local military salute works,” Gar said. “Not much more than a ritualized wave of the hand, I’d say.”

“I’ll view that as a hopeful sign, if you don’t mind. What do you think of the local ruling class?”

“Professional administrator, by the look of him—not a part-timer, like the merchants of Venice or the Athenian citizen-assembly.”

“I think I prefer amateurs…”

“Oh, give this one the benefit of the doubt. At least he’s probably trained for the job.”

“Yeah, and has figured out how to hand it on to his son, definitely not his daughter. At least the amateurs don’t have a vested interest in bloating the bureaucracy.”

“You’re being unfair,” Gar chided. “One look at the man is scarcely enough proof to convict him of so many crimes.”

“Why not? He’s old enough to have children. And if he’s a trained paper-pusher, he’s part of a bureaucracy.”

“Aren’t you using a rather broad definition of ‘bureaucracy’…? Wait, what’s this?”

The torrent of babble from the curve ahead had finally become loud enough to force itself on their attention.

“A crowd,” Dirk said. “Don’t look at me that way—somebody had to state the obvious. They don’t sound threatening, anyway.”

“No, rather happy—a holiday sound, in fact. Let’s see what’s going on.”

They rounded the curve and saw peasants lining both sides of the road, chattering and gesturing to one another, smiling, bright-eyed, excited. Some had packs over their shoulders and were sharing food and drink with one another. There was a sprinkling of merchants, carters, and other wayfarers among them, laughing and sharing their own provisions.

“You were right,” Dirk said, “it is a holiday. When does the parade start?”

“Let’s join them and see if we can overhear anything.” Gar stepped off the roadway, leaning on his staff and looking about with a gentle, interested smile. Dirk followed, growling, “Why do I feel conspicuous?”

The peasants glanced up, and conversation muted for a few minutes—benign smile or not, Gar was still a scary figure. But he offered no harm, only spoke quietly with Dirk—so quietly that none of them could hear—and the people went back to chatting with one another. Dirk could almost see Gar’s ears prick up, and wondered what his own looked like—but he was hearing words that he recognized. Yes, there was an accent, broader vowels and lazier consonants, but he had no difficulty at all eavesdropping.

“I can understand them,” Gar muttered.

“Me too,” Dirk said. “That’s not a good sign.”

“No, not at all,” Gar said, with a casualness that made Dirk’s skin crawl. “It bespeaks a very rigid government, one that’s stonily conservative.”

That raised several interesting possibilities, none of which Dirk really wanted to think about at the moment. To put the unpleasant implications of this out of his mind, he paid attention to what the nearest people were saying.

“The Protector himself! What would bring him so far into the countryside?”

“I don’t know, but they say he travels around when folk least expect it, to see that his officials do as he tells them and don’t cheat.”

“Cheat him, or other folk?” The woman who had asked the question grinned. “I know, I know—neither.”

“But are they sure he’s coming?” a carter asked, frowning. “How do they know?”

“A crier came riding, calling out to all to clear the road, for the Protector would be passing!”

“I told you we should have made an earlier start,” Dirk growled. “We might have heard the leather-lungs ourselves.”

“He must be riding quite far ahead,” Gar said, surprised. “We’ve been on the road an hour already.”

“Oh, he came through last night,” one woman was telling the farmwife from the cart. “The Protector is kind enough to give us all a chance to see him.”

“And mobilize public support by making sure there’s a cheering throng all the way along,” Dirk muttered.

Far down the road, trumpets sounded. The crowd oohed and aahed, but didn’t start cheering yet.

“So much for the fanfare,” Dirk said. “When do we get the overture?”

The trumpets sounded again, then again and again, each time closer. The oohing and aahing became louder and louder. Then horsemen appeared, trotting down the road and calling out, “Make way for the Protector! Make way for he who guides and judges all the Commonwealth!”

Guardsmen in dark blue livery followed on horseback, lances low to push back peasants who were beginning to strain toward the road. Behind them came a severe, black-and-silver open carriage. Two men in charcoal-gray gowns rode in the backward-facing seat, watching a lean, grave, unsmiling man who waved to the people, turning from side to side. He wore black robes with a huge, weighty silver chain, a flat, broad-brimmed black hat, and a black beard shot through with gray.

The people cheered. The people went crazy, throwing their caps in the air, waving frantically, crowding forward so that the two guards who followed the carriage had to ride by its rear wheels; their halberds down to push the crowd away. Dirk and Gar craned their necks with the rest, very interested to have a look at a high executive, or whatever he was, of this strange backward planet on which they had landed. The leading guards came up, their pikes low, and Dirk and Gar leaped back with the rest.

Then the carriage spun by, and for a second or two, the Protector was looking right at them, waving rather wearily. He looked away, turning to the other side of the road, and the rear guards came up. They passed, and the crowd moaned with disappointment—though whether it was at the briefness of the Protector’s appearance, or at having to go back to work, Gar and Dirk couldn’t guess. They certainly stretched the holiday out as long as they could, turning to one another and talking excitedly.

“He was so lofty, so commanding!” one woman burbled to another.

“But so weary!” her companion replied. “The poor man, with the weight of us all on his shoulders!”

“I have lived all my life waiting for this day,” a man sighed, “and I shall tell my grandchildren of it!”

“Was he not grand to look upon?” a youth asked Dirk, eyes glowing.

“Very impressive,” Dirk replied. “You’ve never seen him before, then.”

“I?” The youth laughed. “I haven’t even seen twenty summers, sir! It would have been rare good fortune for me to have seen him.”

An older man looked keenly at them. “But you have seen him before, have you?”

“One of the benefits of being in arms,” Dirk answered, smiling, “and of being sent on missions now and again.” Vague as the answer was, it seemed to satisfy the man—perhaps because it was so vague that he could read into it whatever he wanted. He was turning away to exchange exclamations with a friend, when a clarion voice called, “Hear ye, hear ye! Listen to the magistrate!”

The companions turned and looked. A man in a dark red robe stood in the center of the road, hands folded across his stomach and almost hidden by his long, full sleeves. He was young, perhaps in his late twenties, but already had an air of authority that seemed to assume no one would even think of disobeying. Gradually, the crowd quieted, and the magistrate called out, “You have seen, good people! It has been a wonderful morning for us all, for rarely indeed are we fortunate enough to see the man who is Protector of all this land, Reeve of all reeves, Magistrate of all magistrates! Treasure the memory, and speak of it to one another, the more surely to engrave it on your hearts! But the time for gazing is past, and the time for your work has come again! Go now, to your homes and fields and shops! Talk still about the delight of it all, but go!”

The buzz of conversation started up again, and the people turned away, some back into the fields that bordered the road but most away down the cobblestones, presumably to the lanes that led to their villages.

“I think we’d better go with them,” Gar said.

“Yes, as far from that red robe as possible,” Dirk agreed. “I smell authority, and I’d just as soon avoid it until I know whether or not the aroma is poisonous.”

They set off, quickly working their way into the center of the throng. The magistrate’s guards glanced briefly at the tall figure in the brown livery, but didn’t seem to think it all that unusual, for they turned back to attending their young master as he mounted a tall roan. They set off down the road, and were soon far enough away for Dirk and Gar to feel safe. They dropped back from the peasant throng until they were out of earshot.

“So,” Dirk said, “it seems we lucked into getting a look at the chief executive after all.”

“Yes, but is he only the executive, or the whole government?” Gar asked.

“They did call him ‘Magistrate of all magistrates’,” Dirk said, “but they didn’t say anything about who enforces the laws.”

“I don’t think he’s a king of any sort,” Gar said, “though he might serve one.”

“Could be, but I think the herald would have mentioned that among his other titles,” Dirk said thoughtfully. “Apparently the guy in the red robe is his local representative.”

“Yes—very young to be a magistrate, don’t you think?” Gar asked. “I thought the office usually went to a minor local aristocrat, or a businessman who has managed to build up enough of a fortune to build himself a big house and spread a few bribes.”

Dirk shrugged. “Maybe he’s just finished law school, and this is his internship.”

“That seems unlikely,” Gar said slowly, “but the idea of having finished some sort of training does strike a bell.”

“Let’s just hope it’s not the alarm,” Dirk replied. “You know, I’m beginning to feel a little too visible in this soldier outfit.”

“So am I, but we don’t know if it would be safe to travel in any other disguise,” Gar said. “We need information, Dirk, in a bad way.”

“Yes, and I know what that means,” Dirk sighed.

Gar nodded. “A local, preferably one who’s in trouble with the authorities for the right reasons.”

“Yes, for doing what his conscience tells him when the magistrate tells him not to. If we don’t find one, can we declare this planet to be well-governed, and leave?”

Gar was silent for the next few paces, then said, “The Protector did seem to be very popular—but that might have been simply because he was the head of the government, and a rarity. Still, if the only outlaws we find are the kind who have no conscience, or are just out for themselves no matter who gets hurt—well, yes, I suppose that will be proof enough.”

Dirk loosed a huge sigh of relief.