Free She Walks in Darkness by Evangeline Walton Page B

civilized man can always outwit such as them.’
    “I thought, ‘I hope you know as much about explosives as you think you do,’ but I had too much sense to say so. And after that he was very pleasant again; we had a good evening. I’m sorry if I did offend the old fellow the other day; I miss him. Besides, I owe him a lot; I certainly should consider his feelings.”
    On the twenty-seventh, Prince Mino did come back. The first part of the entry is lost, drowned in that brownstain, and from there on there is never a clear page, but I think we made out most of that scene. We had to start in the middle of a sentence. “...beginning to seem like my own tomb, sir. You’ve made me very comfortable here, but I must say these wall paintings would make almost anybody afraid of death.” Roger must have been looking at that vulture-demon, with his serpent-whip.
    “But that was wisely arranged.” Prince Mino’s smile was tolerant. “The early Rasenna went dancing into battle. No race ever had a more fiery lust for life, but by teaching them to expect bliss after death, their priest-kings made them fearless warriors. Later, in their decline, when they had lost hope and desired only to drowse pleasantly toward death, then priests who were no longer kings had to make death terrible. The common people must always be told what to believe.”
    “The fear treatment doesn’t seem to have worked.” Roger evidently couldn’t resist saying that.
    “Because they had turned from their warrior kings; because Greek democracy had emasculated them. Democracy!” Prince Mino’s lip curled. “That never has lasted long anywhere. In Greece, its birthplace, it endured but a moment. In lands whose fat merchants are guarded by the sea, like your Britain and America, it soon will go down before planes and submarines. Young men like you should face that fact, make sounder plans for the future.”
    Roger seems to have said slowly, “Any man would be a fool to try to say what this world will be like by 1990, sir. But this I do know: without democracy, it won’t be a place I’ll enjoy living in.”
    “We disagree.” Prince Mino shrugged. “You think the people rule you. Your money-loving shopkeepers really do: men without taste or fineness. Fascism, if intelligently directed, could have saved the world. Mussolini had a gleam of real vision, one his poor peasant’s brain could never execute. Only those are fit to rule whose ancestors have ruled before them; judgment, true leadership, require both breeding and heredity. A base-born dog like Benito presumed too far when he dared to take as his own symbol the Etruscan axe—the fasces. He should have been whipped back to his kennel then.”
    “We democrats are trying to do that now, sir.”
    “To what end? Stop this precious pair—the butcher’s son and the housepainter—and more louts will rise. You lack the wit to keep such ruffians in their native gutters. Such foolishness comes of a faith that believes its God actually to have incarnated himself in a carpenter’s son.”
    Roger says that he never had thought of himself as a religious man, yet that shocked him. He said bluntly, “Like a good many other scholars—better known ones—I feel that their religion ruined your Rasenna, sir. Their belief that their race had to pass away at the end of a certain number of cycles.”
    Prince Mino stiffened. “Each of those cycles could have lasted a thousand years. Or ten thousand. Corruption ruined the Rasenna; the poison they sucked in from the lower races. There was no flaw in the laws Tarchon laid down for his people.”
    “Tarchon, sir? I thought Tages was the law-giver—the gray-haired boy-god who rose out of the Earth.”
    Prince Mino smiled gently. “Are you too naive to understand that myth? The boy must have been carefully chosen and coached. Silver-gilt was put on his hair, and he must have had some good blood to learn his lessons so well. Bastards can sometimes have great