Chapter 10 In Which Gretsella Encounters Some Unanticipated Plot Twists
In Which Gretsella Encounters Some Unanticipated Plot Twists
Over the next day or so, Gretsella was forced to admit that plotting to overthrow the king was much easier once she’d obtained His Majesty’s consent.
She had him write very polite notes to the members of his advisory council in which he alerted them to this new state of affairs and appointed his mother Chief Minister Responsible for the Collapse of Government.
(The title was Gretsella’s idea; Sir George had expressed skepticism about whether or not it sent the wrong message.) Her first task in her new role was asking Janet and Herman to nose around a little and find out who was responsible for the attempted coup.
The answer came quickly: It was the horrible Sir Harold of the Rugged Jawline and his equally nasty brothers, who were all incensed over Bradley’s recent adjustments to the tax code.
Bradley was quietly devastated by the news.
Fortunately for him, Sir George was there to provide sympathy and comfort.
He also provided amusingly catty mumbled remarks about Sir Harold when Bradley was out of earshot.
Gretsella patted Sir George’s knee. “I never liked him either,” she said, and didn’t bother getting Bradley’s permission before having the whole Harold clan tossed into one of the palace’s damper dungeon cells.
With that out of the way, the next step was to devise a plan for gracefully extracting Bradley from power.
Gretsella held another meeting, this time in the warm and well-lit council hall, with Bradley in attendance.
Janet piped up the instant Gretsella declared that the meeting was in session.
“What if, instead of a coup, we tried to establish a democracy?”
Everyone made utterances like “Ah!” or “Hmm” at that. Bradley rubbed his chin thoughtfully. No one said anything for a long moment. Finally, brave Sir George spoke for all of them. “What’s a democracy?”
Janet explained: “It’s when you allow The People to choose their own ruler every few years.” She said “The People” with the audible capital letters of someone who had read a lot of books on political theory but spent very little time with the smelly and irritating members of the general public.
Gretsella frowned. “That’s a terrible idea,” she said. “The people are mostly idiots.”
“So are most of the rulers we have now,” Janet countered. “The People can’t really do much worse than a bunch of talking animals. No offense, Your Majesty.”
“None taken,” Bradley said, his face gone slightly pink.
“I do think that the mice and squirrels might have been a little overenthusiastic when it came to supporting my reign, because they liked the part where I was the old king’s son and raised in the forest. They don’t have to pay taxes, after all, so they don’t have to be very practical about the government. ”
Everyone took a moment to digest this pronouncement.
Sir George had a very soft, silly sort of look on his nice, earnest face.
“That was…very insightful, Bradley.” The surprisingly was present but unvoiced, because Sir George was a kind man who was also clearly, truly fond of Bradley.
The fact that he was still making soppy faces at him now, when he knew that Bradley was soon to experience the world’s most precipitous demotion in his plunge from king to journeyman hairdresser, made that very clear.
Even Gretsella herself, if not actually moved, was at least nudged by George’s devotion to her only child.
And Bradley’s insight into squirrel psychology was fairly impressive, by Bradley standards.
“Thank you,” Bradley said, his face gone even pinker. He cleared his throat. “Anyway, couldn’t we give this democracy idea a try? Maybe the people would like it.”
“The people are very likely to like all sorts of things that aren’t any good for them,” Gretsella said, but now she was considering it. “How exactly do they determine who the people want to be their leader?”
“People who want the job run for office,” Janet said, pronouncing the phrase as if it were the name of an expensive foreign wine.
“They go around making speeches in town squares and things, and whipping the crowds up into a frenzy about how they’re going to vote the bastards out.
Then there’s an election, and everyone gets to vote on who they’d like to be in charge, and whoever gets the most votes gets to run the country. ”
Everyone was staring at her, their faces full of fascination, bafflement, and abject horror. Sir George was the first to speak up. “But then, couldn’t just any maniac end up running the country?”
“That could happen now,” Janet said. “As long as the maniac has the right father. It isn’t as if they screen princes for competence before they let them take over.”
There was a beat of uncomfortable silence as everyone tried their best not to look at Bradley.
Then, to Gretsella’s surprise, Herman spoke.
“So, will we just go around telling people that the king’s getting tired of kinging and wants to do a democracy, and maybe they might want to try their hands at the job?
I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, but I think if I went down to my local bar and said that, everyone would just think I’d gotten kicked in the head again. ”
“We’ll need it to be more organized than that,” Janet said. “Maybe a public education campaign to teach everyone about democracy and why they should like it.”
“A propaganda campaign, you might call it,” Gretsella said.
She was looking at Janet now, thoughtful.
She might still be denying that she was a witch, but Janet was very witchlike in her eagerness to ply her trade.
“It’s lucky for us that we have a minister of propaganda already established in the role. ”
“I’d be happy to take charge of the project, of course,” Janet said demurely. “I’m sure that you’re much too busy to waste your time writing silly songs about the electoral process, Grandmother.”
“I certainly am,” Gretsella said, forced to agree with this characterization of her importance and busyness despite her mounting suspicion that she was being handled.
Janet was much too much like a witch to not be up to something.
Gretsella wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Janet was already making plans for negotiating a generous severance package by any means necessary.
She already had enough blackmail material on everyone surrounding Bradley to power a lifetime’s worth of anonymous letters with the words all cut out of magazines.
It was a good thing that Gretsella knew an excellent spell for giving the senders of nasty letters a debilitating twitch whenever they ventured near a pair of scissors or a pot of glue.
“You’ll do your propaganda campaign, then, and we’ll give this democracy thing the old coven try. ”
Janet threw herself wholeheartedly into the propaganda campaign, which turned out to be complicated enough of a task to require a budgetary increase for the Propaganda Department so that Janet could hire junior jesters.
This was, perhaps, what Janet had been after in the first place.
If there was one thing that had better staying power than a king, it was the elaborate overpaid bureaucracy surrounding him.
If Janet really wanted her position to become permanent, Gretsella thought, she would hire at least three administrators who could invent forms for the jesters to fill out before, during, and after they did any jesting.
However, she decided to refrain from making this suggestion to Janet directly: The girl was fully capable of coming up with fiendish schemes all on her own.
In any case, the junior jesters were apparently competent enough at their tasks for their work to have immediate and obvious effects.
The streets of the capital echoed with the sound of the word democracy, particularly in the context of sentences such as “What the hell is a democracy?” and “Why are all of the damn jesters singing about nothing but democracy all of a sudden? What happened to a nice old-fashioned love song?” and “If I have to hear one more word about democracy, I’m burning this whole place to the ground, so help me I will! ”
Gretsella spoke to Janet, who conceded that the junior jesters had, perhaps, been slightly overzealous in their efforts.
She instructed them to be less irritating in their propagandizing.
Herman suggested that a pro-democracy organization funded by the Propaganda Department could give out free grilled meat and beer on the street corners.
“We could call them community festivals,” he said.
“As if they just happened on their own, natural-like, only we’ll be using them to trick the people into wanting to overthrow the government. ”
“Diabolical,” Gretsella said admiringly. “Make it so, Janet!”
Janet made it so. The revolutionary spirit began to bloom on the streets of the capital.
A few people were even so bold as to announce themselves as candidates, though most of them were the sorts of people who liked to wear extremely eye-catching hats and talk a lot about one-time-only opportunities to start work-from-home businesses.
At what Gretsella and Janet mutually decided was the most opportune time, Bradley gave a stirring speech from the palace balcony on the many advantages of democracy.
Gretsella noticed the people in the crowd exchanging glances before venturing a cautious cheer or two.
Eventually, some clever personage started up a chant of “Hail, King Bradley, Bringer of Democracy!,” which created a bit of glance exchanging up on the balcony.