Chapter XL:
Three Years Later

MY FLAG WAS flying so high—so to speak—that I no longer felt obligated to work in secret; I revealed to an astonished world the full extent of my magical prowess. That is to say, I enchanted all those Congressional blowhards into slinking off into the night. Nobody missed them, except perhaps the vacationing pilgrims who thought it a nifty thing for the children to see first-hand their government at work—I mean, endlessly talking and essentially accomplishing nothing, year upon year upon year, unless one happened to visit on the day Congress was voting itself a raise, the only thing they ever agreed upon as a unified body that did not carry death-or-taxes consequences for some segment of the populace.

Although getting Congress to shut up and go away was a neat enough trick, I soon found myself being called upon to perform all sorts of services. To some people it was continued verification of my claims, but the rest had decided that once magic had been introduced into their lives, they could not live without it, somewhat akin to the dawn of the wireless telephone era of a hundred years earlier, I imagine. My energy became so tapped-out that I found it necessary to anoint legions of apprentices to perform weather spells and handle school bullies and teach errant boyfriends unforgettable lessons, and that sort of day-to-day thing, holding the apprentices to strict standards of conduct lest they fall to the temptation of using their magical arts for ill rather than good. With Clarice overseeing them as Apprentice Number One, supported by a hierarchy of magical managers, the system worked pleasingly well.

There arose protests from the ranks of the various religious organizations, as I expected; but as in my native era, no one proved strong enough to make good upon the Lord’s injunction not to suffer a witch to live. Since the pope wielded no more influence than did the constitutionally bound and gagged King of England, the resistance did not last long. The general masses were too enchanted with all the conveniences well-applied magic could offer them.

It was a busy three years, and they sped like wildfire across arid grass.

Malory took to her Congress-free, one-woman government as a young eagle takes to the air: she soared. Two hundred years of political gridlock melted before the onslaught of her new policies and procedures. The farm system for homeless people, after proving its success with the DC contingent and across America, became adopted by most major cities worldwide. Real solutions to perennial problems became implemented. She balanced the budget, kept it balanced, and made inroads upon the public debt. She restructured the educational system, separating the true scholars from those whose aptitudes leaned toward trades and military service; the remainder, whose test scores sieved them out the bottom, were put to use in the construction and maintenance of infrastructure and other gainful if mindless tasks. Productivity and wages rose, the cost of goods and services remained solid and fair, and the people prospered.

My Knights continued to prosper on the ball-field, I found time to work on this chronicle, Sandy and I cemented our relationship with the exchanging of rings and vows,—and I stopped firing him from the team and even hired his sister Amanda as my personal assistant. For the first time in my strange dual-century existence, I felt truly happy. Just about everyone was happy with the way things turned out except the unemployed politicians, but they had been revealed to be such bloodsucking parasites upon society that nobody cared whether they were happy or not. Nobody except me. I realized the danger this group could pose if they ever decided to marshal their forces against me and try to snatch back the power they had lost, so I tackled the threat head-on: I saddled every ex-politician with a wireless advertising device and charged them to sally forth among the masses with their sundry messages to buy this and that and the other marvel.

This may seem benign at first glance and an ineffective solution to my problem, for this would afford these disgruntled individuals many chances to interact with their former constituents and foment a grass-roots rebellion. However, I was not worried: after a few weeks of conducting their advertising campaigns, the subtle radiation being leaked by the devices would begin to scramble their brains, a lobotomy performed the barest fraction at a time, eventually rendering them docile.

That was the plan.

My chief mistake lay in not forcing Ambrose to wear one, out of deference to his position as Malory’s husband. That decision is the only one I would change had I the opportunity to live these years over again.

If you, perceptive reader, are by this time wondering why I did not, as sixth-century Queen of Gore, wave my hand and take my brother’s throne, rest assured that I pondered this matter long, hard, and often during this time, too. One conclusion I kept reaching, like it or not, was that I had been born, raised, and trained in the tradition of the divine appointing of rulers, and so deep within my soul I had long ago accepted the right of King Arthur, the brother whom I had despised from the hour of his birth, to the throne of England because he had won that right by freeing the sword and wielding it to unite the kingdom; therefore, my attempts to unseat him failed because I had secretly wished for them to fail. That realization prompted another, no less noteworthy one: hate and love are two edges of the same sword; like darkness and light, there never exists one without the other, and the other cannot be perceived except in the presence of the one. My heretofore acknowledged and long-standing hatred of my brother I began to perceive as a skewed reflection of my even deeper abiding love for him as my brother, as the uncle who had inducted my son Uwaine into the high company of the Round Table in spite of our personal differences, and as my God-ordained liege lord. A lone revelation cannot obliterate centuries of rancor and malice, but it was a start. Watching Sandy strengthen his relationship with his long-lost sister Amanda pushed me even further along this path.

Once these enlightening thoughts took shape within my brain, they began birthing many more, not the least of which being how I might turn my hand to helping Arthur rather than hindering him, should I ever chance upon the means to return to our mutual century.

To that end, I performed copious research into ways I might employ available technologies to send myself back in time, since this was the one enchantment that had eluded me, and thus the one enchantment I desired most to succeed. One technology seemed particularly promising: time-folding, the warping of one’s perception of time in response to the age-old plea of, “I want the last hour of my life back!” However, time-folding was yet in its infancy, the only commercially available devices being overpriced curios designed to, for example, prevent a child from breaking its arm. No device of the magnitude I required—to send me backward fifteen centuries, not merely fifteen minutes—existed.

Or so I believed.