Once More With Footnotes

of being a cripple at best or most likely a gangrenous corpse, and I was a hero. Or, rather, since I didn't have the muscles for a hero, obviously a wizard.
     
                  I was mad to act like that. You're not supposed to meddle. But what the hell. I was marooned. I was never going home. I didn't care. And I could cure, which is almost as powerful as being able to kill. I taught hygiene. I taught them about turnips, and running water , and basic medicine.
     
                  The boss of the valley was a decent enough old knight called Sit Ector. Nimue knew him, which surprised me, but shouldn't have. The old boy was only one step up from his peasants, and seemed to know them all, and wasn't much richer than they were except that history had left him with a crumbling castle and a suit of rusty armour. Nimue went up to the castle one day a week to be a kind of lady's maid for his daughter.
     
                  After I pulled the bad teeth that had been making his life agony, old Ector swore eternal friendship and gave me the run of the place. I met his son Kay, a big hearty lad with the muscles of an ox and possibly the brains of one, and there was this daughter to whom no one seemed to want to introduce me properly, perhaps because she was very attractive in a quiet kind of way. She had one of those stares that seems to be reading the inside of your skull. She and Nimue got along like sisters. Like sisters that get along well, I mean.
     
                  I became a big man in the neighborhood. It's amazing the impression you can make with a handful of medicines, some basic science, and a good line in bull.
     
                  Poor old Merlin had left a hole which I filled like water in a cup. There wasn't a man in the country who wouldn't listen to me.
     
                  And whe never she had a spare moment Nimue followed me, watching like an owl.
     
                  I suppose at the time I had some dream, like the Connecticut Yankee, of single-handedly driving the society into the twentieth century.
     
                  You might as well try pushing the sea with a b room.
     
                  "But they do what you tell them," Nimue said. She was helping me in the lab at the time, I think. I call it the lab, it was just a room in the castle. I was trying to make penicillin.
     
                  "That's exactly it," I told her. "And what good is that? The m oment I turn my back, they go back to the same old ways."
     
                  "I thought you told me a dimocracy was where people did what they wanted to do," she said.
     
                  "It's a democracy," I said. "And it's fine for people to do what they want to do, provided they do what 's right."
     
                  She bit her lip thoughtfully. "That does not sound sensible."
     
                  "That's how it works."
     
                  "And when we have a, a democracy, every man says who shall be king? "
     
                  " Something like that, yes. "
     
                  " And what do the women do?"
     
                  I had to think about that. "Oh, they should have the vote, too," I said. "Eventually. It'll take some time. I don't think Albion is ready for female suffrage."
     
                  "It has female sufferage already," she said, with unusual bitterness. "Suffrage. It means the right to vote." I patted he r hand.
     
                  "Anyway," I told her, "you can't start with a democracy. You have to work up through stuff like tyranny and monarchy first. That way people ate so relieved when they get to democracy that they hang onto it."
     
                  "People used to do what the king tol d them," she said, carefully measuring bread and milk into the shallow bowls. "The high king, I mean. Everyone did what the high king said. Even the lesser kings."
     
                  I'd heard about this high king. In his time, apparently, the land had flowed with so much milk and honey people must have needed waders to get around. I don't go for that kind of thing. I'm a practical man. When people talk about their great past they're usually trying to excuse the mediocre present.
     
                  "Such a person might get things done," I s aid. "But then they die, and history