As MacDonald said of Robert Wilson, "This is not an account of how
Boosterism came to Arcadia." It's a devil of a long way from it. And
once the high point of a story has been reached and passed, it is
pointless to prolong it too much. The capture of the Greatest Noble
broke the power of the Empire of the Great Nobles forever. The loyal
subjects were helpless without a leader, and the disloyal ones, near the
periphery of the Empire, didn't care. The crack Imperial troops simply
folded up and went home. The Greatest Noble went on issuing orders, and
they were obeyed; the people were too used to taking orders from
authority to care whether they were really the Greatest Noble's own idea
or not.
In a matter of months, two hundred men had conquered an empire, with a
loss of thirty-five or forty men. Eventually, they had to execute the
old Greatest Noble and put his more tractable nephew on the throne, but
that was a mere incident.
Gold? It flowed as though there were an endless supply. The commander
shipped enough back on the first load to make them all wealthy.
The commander didn't go back home to spend his wealth amid the luxuries
of the Imperial court, even though Emperor Carl appointed him to the
nobility. That sort of thing wasn't the commander's meat. There, he
would be a fourth-rate noble; here, he was the Imperial Viceroy,
responsible only to the distant Emperor. There, he would be nothing;
here, he was almost a king.
Two years after the capture of the Greatest Noble, he established a new
capital on the coast and named it Kingston. And from Kingston he ruled
with an iron hand.
As has been intimated, this was _not_ Arcadia. A year after the founding
of Kingston, the old capital was attacked, burned, and almost fell under
siege, due to a sudden uprising of the natives under the new Greatest
Noble, who had managed to escape. But the uprising collapsed because of
the approach of the planting season; the warriors had to go back home
and plant their crops or the whole of the agriculture-based country
would starve--except the invading Earthmen.
Except in a few instances, the natives were never again any trouble.
But the commander--now the Viceroy--had not seen the end of his
troubles.
He had known his limitations, and realized that the governing of a whole
planet--or even one continent--was too much for one man when the
population consists primarily of barbarians and savages. So he had
delegated the rule of a vast area to the south to another--a Lieutenant
commander James, known as "One-Eye," a man who had helped finance the
original expedition, and had arrived after the conquest.
One-Eye went south and made very small headway against the more barbaric
tribes there. He did not become rich, and he did not achieve anywhere
near the success that the Viceroy had. So he came back north with his
army and decided to unseat the Viceroy and take his place. That was five
years after the capture of the Greatest Noble.
One-Eye took Center City, the old capital, and started to work his way
northward, toward Kingston. The Viceroy's forces met him at a place
known as Salt Flats and thoroughly trounced him. He was captured, tried
for high treason, and executed.
One would think that the execution ended the threat of Lieutenant
commander James, but not so. He had a son, and he had had followers.