Flag In Exile

'Of course.'

'Then if men, be it willfully or in simple error, violate God's law, do not other men have a responsibility to correct those violations?'

'He's right, Samuel.' The rage in Burdette's voice was thicker and deeper than he'd let Mackenzie hear. 'You and John can talk about legal considerations all you want, but look what happened when we tried to exercise our legal rights. That whore Harrington's thugs almost beat Brother Marchant to death for simply speaking God's will!'

Mueller frowned. He'd seen the press coverage of the episode, and he suspected only the Harrington Guard's intervention had saved Marchant. Still, they'd had to do that, hadn't they? Harrington's Sky Domes personnel had led the strong-arm groups which had broken up the demonstrations outside Harrington House, after all. Most people might not have noticed that, but Mueller had, and felt a grudging respect for how she'd hidden her own involvement. Yet the strategy was blatantly obvious to anyone who knew where to look, and if she'd let the mob kill a priest before her very eyes, other people besides Samuel Mueller might look much more closely.

Under those circumstances, letting her subjects lynch Marchant would only have made her own culpability clear and branded her before the rest of Grayson's people as the agent of sin she was.

'Perhaps so,' he said finally, 'but I still fail to see what more we can do, William. I deeply regret what's happened to Brother Marchant,' he nodded to the ex-priest, 'but it was all done legally, and...'

'Legally!' Burdette spat. 'Since when does an upstart like Mayhew have the right to dictate to one of the Keys in his own steading?!'

'Now just a minute, William!' Burdette's question had touched a nerve, and anger flickered in Mueller's eyes, not at his host, but real all the same, and disgust sharpened his voice. 'It wasn't just the Protector; it was the entire Sacristy and the Chamber! For that matter, most of the other Keys supported the decision when Reverend Hanks brought the writ before us. I agree Mayhew pushed for it, but he covered himself too well for us to make an open fight of it over steadholder privilege. You know that.'

'And why did the Keys support it?' Burdette shot back. 'I'll tell you why, for the same reason we all sat there like so many gutless eunuchs and let Mayhew ram that infidel bitch down our throats last year! My God, Samuel, the woman was whoring with that foreign scum, what's his name, Tankersley!, even then, and Mayhew knew it! But did he tell us? Of course he didn't! He knew not even he could've gotten her past the Keys if he had!'

'I'm not so sure of that,' Mueller said grudgingly. 'I mean, infidel or no, she did save us from Masada.'

'Only so her own side could devour us! We knew the Masadans were enemies, so Satan threw something more insidious at us, didn't he? He offered us Harrington as a 'heroine' and the bait of 'modern technology,' and that fool Mayhew swallowed the poison whole! What does it matter whether Masada destroys us by force of arms or Manticore corrupts us by trickery and bribery?'

Mueller took another sip of wine, and his eyes were hooded. He agreed that Benjamin Mayhew's 'reforms' were poisoning his world, but he found his host's rampant religious fervor wearing. And dangerous. Burdette was too much the fanatic, and fanatics could be ... precipitous. Any hasty action might be disastrous, Mayhew and Harrington were too popular, and before their opponents could accomplish anything, the groundwork to undermine that popularity had to be in place, so perhaps it was time for a note of caution.

'And what about the Havenites?' he asked. 'If we break with Manticore, what's to keep them from conquering us outright?'

'My Lord, Haven would have no interest in us if Manticore hadn't sucked us into their Alliance,' Marchant replied before Burdette could. 'It's not enough for Queen Elizabeth to corrupt us, she had to bring her ungodly foreign war to us, as well!'

'And it was Mayhew who made that possible,' Burdette added in a sorter, more persuasive voice. 'He was the wedge, and he did it for his own selfish reasons. For over a hundred years, the Protector's Council governed Grayson. That bastard used the 'crisis', the crisis he created in the first place by convincing the Council to consider allying with Manticore, to turn the clock back and force us all to accept 'personal rule' again. Personal rule!' Burdette actually spat on the library's expensive carpet. 'The man's a damned dictator, Samuel, and you John want to talk to me about 'legal' options?'

Mueller started to speak, then stopped and took yet another swallow of wine. The implications of Burdette's tirade were frightening, and he wasn't at all certain he shared Marchant's dismissal of Haven's ambitions. On the other hand, he thought suddenly, how likely was the People's Republic to strike at an ex-ally of Manticore? Wouldn't they be more inclined to leave Grayson alone? To adopt a hands-off policy to encourage other Manticoran to consider the advantages of neutrality? And intemperate as Burdette’s description of the domestic situation might be, there was a core of truth to it. A hard and painful core.

The Council had reduced the Protectorship to figurehead status long before Benjamin Mayhew's birth, and the Conclave of Steadholders had liked it that way, for they had controlled the Council. But Benjamin had remembered something the Keys had forgotten, Mueller thought bitterly. He'd remembered that the people of Grayson still revered the Mayhew name, and in the crisis of the Masadan War, while the Council and Keys had dithered, Mueller's face burned with shame as he recalled his own panic, but he was too honest with himself to deny it, Benjamin had acted swiftly and decisively.

That probably would have been enough to shatter the Councils power by itself, but then he'd survived the Maccabeans attempted assassination, as well, and Manticore had gone on to destroy the Masadan threat forever, a combination of events which had devastated the old system. No Protector in centuries had been as popular as Benjamin now was, despite his unholy social 'reforms,' and, Mueller thought bitterly, the Conclave of Steaders had embraced the renewed power of the Protector with enthusiasm. The Chamber's lower house had become almost as irrelevant as the Protectorship itself as the Council secured its control. Now, in alliance with the Protector, it held the balance of power in the Chamber, and if it had been both respectful and moderate in its demands so far, it had also made it clear that it intended to be treated henceforth as the Conclave of Steadholders equal.

And the worst of it was that there seemed to be nothing anyone could do about it. Lord Prestwick remained Mayhew's Chancellor. Indeed, he'd become one of Mayhew's champions, claiming that a stronger executive was critical in time of war, which was a direct slap at his fellow Steadholders' failure to provide a strong foreign policy. But there'd been no need for a foreign policy, a corner of Mueller's brain protested angrily. Not until Manticore had brought its damned war to Yeltsin's Star, and that was Mayhew's fault, not the Keys'!

The Steadholder’s head ached, and he massaged his closed eyes while his mind raced. He was a man of the Faith, he told himself. A servant of God who'd never asked to be born into a time of such turmoil. He'd always tried to live by God's will, to meet the Tests God sent him, but why had God chosen to send him this Test? All he'd ever wanted was to do God's will and, someday, in God's good time, pass his steading and his power on to his son and his sons sons.

But Benjamin Mayhew wouldn't let him do that, and Mueller knew it. The Protector couldn't, for the old tradition of steadholder autonomy was anathema to the ugly new world he strove to build in despite of God's will. His reforms were but the tip of an iceberg whose true peril was obvious to any discerning pilot. To make them work, they must be applied across the length and breadth of Grayson, and enforcing them would require an enormous increase in the Swords authority. The Protector would intrude more and more deeply into each steading, always politely, no doubt; always with a pious appeal to the rectitude of his actions in the name of 'equality', unless the power of the Sword was broken soon, decisively. And the Havenite War. The need of a wartime leader for unquestioning obedience. That would be another potent weapon in Mayhew's arsenal, and the only way to take that weapon from his hands was to force a break with Manticore. But the only way to do that...

He lowered his hands at last and looked at Burdette.

'What do you want of me, William?' he asked bluntly. 'Even Reverend Hanks supports the Protector, and whether we like it or not, our world's at war with the most powerful empire in this part of the galaxy. Unless we can