The Ozark trilogy

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  She surely did hope he was right . . . And he ought to be. He ought to be!

  On the wall before her hung a battered map of Ozark, the six continents set out in their oceans, and a pin stuck firmly at the site of each Castle. Black pins for those Families she knew to be dead set against the Confederation and ready to bring it down, come what may-Travellers, Guthries, and Farsons. And the Purdys thrown in, seeing as they’d not have the courage to stand against the other three. Red pins for those she knew to be loyal-Castle Airy, Castle Clark, Castle McDaniels, Castle Motley, Castle Lewis, and her own Brightwater. Green pins for those as might move either way, depending on what happened over the next few days-the Smiths, and the Wommacks. Six months ago the pin that marked Castle Smith had been a red one, but no longer. Their behavior had grown more and more odd, and the Attendant set to watch had told her half an hour ago that every one of the other Families was arrived and safely settled in the Castle, but no sign of the Smiths and no word from them. That did nothing to reasure her.

  It looked, providing you were ignorant, as if things were fairly safe for the Confederation, Six for, only four against, and two undecided: sway those two and it could be eight to four and an easy sweep; lose them and it would be six to six, a standoff. But that would be your impression only if you were ignorant, and Responsible of Brightwater was not. Castles Lewis and Motley could be as loyal as they liked, there was little they could do to help. Two tiny kingdoms sharing one continent not much more than an oversized island, the total not much bigger than Brightwater Kingdom alone. The great bulk of Arkansaw loomed to their east, all of Kintucky to their west, and Tinaseeh-largest of the six continents and held by the Travellers-to their south. If the Confederation did not stand, the Lewises and the Motleys would be hard put to it to do more than make speeches. They could not survive without the help of their neighbors.

  And yet, she could not bring herself to believe that there was really any danger beyond that of the anti-Confederationists wasting this precious week in stalling and wrangling so that none of the necessary work could get done. They had a lot to say about independence, but she was inclined to agree with her grandfather; they must have sense enough to know the terrible price of isolation.

  Responsible sighed, and stamped her foot in frustration. She had cast Spells half the night, she’d done Formalisms & Transformations till her hands ached, and she’d gotten only one answer. An answer she could of gotten with Granny Magic alone, reading leaves in a teacup. Trouble ahead, she kept getting-as if she didn’t know that! Something was wrong with her data, or something had been wrong with her methods, she had no least idea which; and there was no one she could ask for their opinion, seeing as how everything she was doing was illegal or worse. It fretted her, having no idea what kind of trouble.

  There was a knock at her door, and she called “Come in!” expecting an Attendant telling her it was time for the banquet in the Castle Great Hall, but it was her own Granny Hazelbide.

  “Granny!” she said, laying the thick sheets of paper down on the desk and resigning herself to the fact that there’d be no more reviewing of that speech. The Granny would of come to fuss at her about something, or perhaps a dozen somethings, then there would be the Banquet and the Dance, and then she must sleep or she’d not be fit to give the speech. She was so tired now that the words on the paper blurred when she looked at them.

  “Responsible,” said the Granny back at her.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Do for me, indeed!”

  “Well, then, what can you do for me?” asked Responsible patiently. “What is it, Granny Hazelbide? Has the Housekeeper run off? Is the food spoiled? Do we expect a hurricane off schedule?”“Mercy, you’re the cheery one,” said Granny Hazelbide.

  “If something weren’t fretting you, you wouldn’t be here, Granny, and we both know that. And if something’s fretting you, then for me to be cheery would be foolishness. What’s gone wrong?”

  The Granny sat herself down in a rocker where Responsible would have to turn her chair around to look at her, and folded both arms across her narrow chest.

  “For one thing,” she said, cross as a patch, “the Castle’s full of every kind of devilment ever invented.”

  “Granted,” said Responsible. “And?”“For another, it’s so crowded you can’t find a place to sit nor a place to stand, nor much air to breathe-and the Smiths aren’t even here yet. And if I know them, they’ll bring every piddling relation they can scrape from under a rock, and three dozen Attendants, and a servingmaid to every chick and child-a delegation of one hundred even, I’ll wager you my smallest thimble and my oldest shammybag!”

  “More nearly fifty, Granny,” said Responsible. “You exaggerate.”

  “Still too many, I say!”“Granted,” said Responsible. “But it’s their way, and none of our business to object to it.”

  “I-dislike-it-all,” said Granny Hazelbide, each word separate and alone as it left her mouth, like a solemn pronouncement; and Responsible couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Granny,” she chided, “you’ve known these last twelve months and more that this was coming. And you’ve known how it would be. We’ve gone over it and over it, and my mother has not held back her comments at any time. I don’t know how it is her voice hasn’t worn grooves in the floors by this time, complaining. There’s been ample time to mope and moan and carry on over it, and we’d all come to an agreement that it was worth the trouble. Why are you bothering me about it now?”

  “I have a funny feeling,” muttered Granny Hazelbide, rocking slowly and staring at the floor.

  “A funny feeling.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “What does your funny feeling tell you?”

  “That there’s trouble coming.”

  Responsible shrugged.

  “And what were you expecting?” she asked patiently. This conversation was wearisome, and a waste of time as well, unless the Granny knew something that might be useful. If she did, she was going to make Responsible work for it.

  “Know who’s in the room next to yours?” asked the Granny suddenly.

  “For sure,” said Responsible, surprised at the question. “Anne of Brightwater, and her boring husband, Stewart Crain McDaniels the Sixth. And if I know Anne, and I do, they’ll have the youngest tadling they brought along sleeping in their bed with them for safekeeping.”

  “Wrong,” said the Granny.

  “I arranged it myself.”

  “So you did, but it’s been changed, and your uncles both approved it and remarked as how nobody should bother checking with you since you were so busy, bad cess to ‘em both.”

  Responsible reached both arms above her head and stretched. Law, but she was tired! And asked the Granny, as politely as her strained tolerance would allow, to tell her what she’d come to tell.

  “Who’ve they given me for nearest neighbor, dear Granny Hazelbide?” she pleaded. “Leave off teasing, now, and tell me.”

  “Don’t sass me, missy!”

  “Granny, tell me!” said Responsible. “Or I’ll go back to work on my speech. Notice that it’s on paper? None of your pliofilm sheets for this ceremony-I’d put it on a set of stone tablets if I could carry them.”

  “Granny Leeward,” said the old woman abruptly, and left it at that.

  Responsible took a deep breath before she tried answering, and folded her hands in her lap where they wouldn’t betray her. And then she said, casual as she could make it: “They’ve put Granny Leeward in the room beside mine?”

  “That they have. It seems she wasn’t comfortable where she was, and it seems the air is better on the side of the Castle nearest you, and it seems she can’t abide the view where the rest of the Traveller delegation has their rooms because it reminds her of a tragic experience she had as a child, and it seems the beds in none of the other rooms will suit her back, which she declared to be frail, though the woman has pure steel for a backbone. But she faced me down a
nd butter wouldn’t of melted in her mouth-and the upshot is that you’re one side of the wall and she’s on the other.”

  Responsible thought about that for a while, and the Granny rocked.

  And then she asked, “And what do you think it means?

  ““Trouble.” Granny Hazelbide’s mouth was a little puckered line.

  Responsible’s mind, despite the control she tried for, took her back to the long table at Castle Traveller, and the black fan in Granny Leeward’s hands, and then the jetty mushrooms, where the fan had been, rotting on the table.

  “Responsible of Brightwater,” demanded Granny Hazelbide sternly, “why are you shivering?”

  “You said `trouble’ your own self, ma’am. And I respect your opinion.”

  “There’s more to it than just mischief,” said the Granny. “Like I said, I have a funny feeling.”

  “Think she’ll strangle me in my bed?” ventured Responsible, her voice careful and light. It wouldn’t do to have the Grannys feuding.

  “I’ll wager she could, without leaving her own.”

  “Ah, but she wouldn’t! She’s a Traveller born, Granny Hazelbide, and she’d be drawn and quartered naked before she’d use illegal magic.”

  “I’ll grant you that much, but you mark my words-”

  “Mark mine,” put in Responsible. It wasn’t polite to interrupt a Granny, but when Granny Hazelbide said to mark her words you were in for a good hour’s worth to mark, and she just simply didn’t have the strength.

  “Mark mine,” she said, “the woman’s done it to torment me, purely because she delights in tormenting me. Nothing more. And I don’t intend to let her have the satisfaction of thinking she’s achieved her purpose.”

  “It’s possible,” said the Granny. “I suppose it’s possible.”

  “And you, I’ll thank you to help me rather than hinder me in this. All I need is that woman thinking she has you upset; it won’t do, Granny! I need you serene, not al1 in a fidget.”

  Get in a staring match with a Granny, you can wear your eyes out, and Responsible’s eyes already burned from no sleep and the hours poring over papers. But she held firm, and it was the old lady who gave way first.

  Chapter 2

  Every Ozark child was familiar with the building called Confederation Hall, whether they lived five miles away or clear on the far side of the Ocean of Storms. Little girls in Granny School, and the boys under the instruction of their Tutors, became familiar with it whether they would or no, and at a very early age. They drew it on sheets of pliofilm and took the pictures home to be fastened up on the housewalls; they made lopsided models of it from Oklahomah’s thick blue clay and gave them to their fathers for desk ornaments. The girls embroidered it on heavy canvas, with name and date beneath; the boys built it of scrap wood and carved their names with the points of their first good knives.

  It was red brick, two stories high plus a tiny attic said to be haunted by a half dozen dead Grannys, with tall narrow arched windows framed in stone, and stone steps leading up to a central door. And the whole sitting square in the middle of a broad green lawn with a walk all around. A spanking-white bandstand stood in the left front corner of the lawn as you faced the Hall door, and the other corner had a statuary group lasered out of Tinaseeh ironwood. There on the pedestal block was First Granny, wading ashore with her skirts pulled up just high enough to show her shoetops; and there was Captain Aaron Dunn McDaniels, standing on the shore and reaching a hand to her; and there stood a miscellaneous child beside him looking very brave. The inscription across the base read: FIRST LANDING-MAY 8, 2021.

  Confederation Hall was authentic Old Earth Primitive, right down to the solar collectors on its roof. And the children knew why. “Not every thing on Earth was bad,” the Grannys and the Tutors told them. “When the Confederation of Continents was established in twenty-five twelve, meeting then just one week in the entire year, Confederation Hall was built as it was to remind us of that. It represents some of the good things.”

  Ordinarily it was a building empty enough to have an echo in its corridors. Even during the one month in four when the Confederation met, the delegations and their staffs weren’t large enough to dent its emptiness, running as they did to two or three men and a single staff member. And the other eight months there was nobody at all there but an Attendant to show visitors around, one official to keep up the records and the archives, and a few servingmaids to see to the cleaning. The Travellers disapproved of that; if they’d had their way it would of been closed up tight except during meeting months. But the Traveller children were taught to make the embroidered pictures and the wooden models just like everybody else’s.

  Today it was a long way from empty. Responsible of Brightwater, standing at the speaker’s podium in the Independence Room, ran her eyes over the crowd of delegates with satisfaction. Not one Family had boycotted the Jubilee, leaving the assembly without its full complement of votes; the message had come in that morning before breakfast, the Smiths were delayed but they would be there. Not every seat was filled-though every seat in the balcony was-and there were empty rows at the back. But it was a satisfying turnout, and when the Smiths did arrive they’d take up a goodly number of those empty spaces.

  Twenty-eight of Ozark’s twenty-nine Grannys, lacking only Granny Gableframe of Castle Smith, filled the first row of the balcony, a sight Responsible had never seen before and wasn’t sure she could handle with a straight face. They looked like twentyeight matched dolls up there, each with her hair knotted up high on top of her head as required, each with the same thin sharp nose and tight-puckered mouth, every last one of them in the same crackly gown and triangular shawl and high-topped shoes, and round eyeglasses perched halfway down their noses whether they needed them or not. Not to mention the twenty-eight sets of flying knitting needles. Responsible looked away from them hastily, feeling unseemly laughter tugging at her mouthcorners, and concentrated on the Travellers instead. That was dampening enough to end all hazard of either laughter or smile. And talk of waste! The Traveller delegation, by her rapid count, numbered twenty-four ebony-coated men. Quite a contrast with the grudging tokens they sent to regular meetings, and each and every one of them entitled to speak to any question raised, plus offer a rebuttal. They had men enough there to tie up the floor for hours at a time.

  At her side, in the big square-cut chair reserved for the leader of the meetings, sat her uncle Donald Patrick Brightwater the 133rd, fidgeting. Since her father had been dead these seven years, it was Donald Patrick that would take over on behalf of Brightwater once she finished the welcoming speech. And he was itching to get at it, too, she could tell. It was made particularly clear when he grabbed her elbow and hissed at her under his breath to get started.

  Responsible didn’t intend to be hurried. There were still people moving into the balcony doors to stand and try to get a glimpse of the proceedings below, and the delegates hadn’t yet left off rustling documents and muttering to one another. She’d not begin to speak till she had silence in the room, and she was not through looking her audience over. She’d had a bad moment when she saw who was included in the Wommack delegation, though she ought to of known Lewis Motley Wommack wouldn’t let himself be left behind. A Grand Jubilee would come along only once every five hundred years; you miss your chance at one, you weren’t likely to get a second try. She would have to deal with the problem he presented as it was presented.

  “Responsible!” said her uncle, too cross now to be discreet. “Will you get on with it? At this rata it’ll be noon and time for dinner before we get past your performance!”

  He had been opposed to her making the speech at all.

  “It’s not appropriate,” he’d complained, three Family meetings in a row, while his wife sat and lived up to her name and waited for him to exhaust himself. Patience of Clark wasted no words on her husband unless she was convinced he couldn’t be relied on to talk himself into silence unassisted.

  Donald Patri
ck had had arguments he considered potent. In the first place, he’d pointed out, women were not allowed in the business sessions of the regular Confederation meetings; therefore, a woman ought not to be allowed in this one. In the second place, if the excuse for having a woman present on the Hall floor was her social function as hostess of this to-do-which he could grudgingly see might be reasonable-then that welcoming speech should not be made by Responsible, it should be made by her mother, as Missus of this Castle. Thorn of Guthrie had raised her brows at that and allowed the ivory perfection of her face to be marred by a frown that was as downright ugly as any expression Responsible had ever seen her use, and had declared as how she’d have nothing to do with it; and no argument of Donald Patrick’s would sway her.

  “Why won’t you do it?” he’d demanded, smacking his fist in the palm of his hand. “I will feel like a plain fool sitting there listening to a fourteen-year-old girl-”

  “Going on fifteen,” put in Granny Hazelbide.

  “-a fourteen-year-old girl giving the welcoming speech on behalf of this Castle and this Kingdom. And so will every member of the Brightwater delegation. And so would you, Thorn of Guthrie, and you, Responsible, if you had any decency at all, or any respect for your father’s memory, rest his soul?”

  Thorn of Guthrie had looked at him and sighed, and then she turned to Responsible and said, “Well, Responsible, will you abide by my order and let your uncle do the honors?”

  Responsible had said no, and Thorn of Guthrie had said “You see?” and Donald Patrick Brightwater had stomped out of the room in a black mood that had lasted well past suppertirne.

  Responsible had made an effort at calming him, in the few chinks of time available to her, promising that as soon as the speech was over she’d move to the balcony and mind her manners for the rest of the week. And Patience of Clark had put as much of her skill into soothing him as she’d considered reasonable.

  But he sat beside her as unresigned and as infuriated as he’d been from the beginning. When Responsible began to speak, the silence having grown tangible enough to suit her, she felt almost obliged to be ready to leap aside at any moment and prevent him from snatching the sheets of paper out of her hands. He had his eyes fixed on the brilliant bunting that circled the room at the level of the balcony and ran across its front rail, with the crests of the Twelve Families hung in strict alphabetical rotation at each looped-up swath, and an expression of propriety slapped onto his face like a mask. But like all men, when sitting rankled him his thigh muscles kept tensing, and he would inch forward in the chair, and then recollect the situation and jerk suddenly bolt upright again. And then start it all over, tugging at his beard and then crossing his arms over his chest and then tugging at the beard again. He put Responsible in mind of a five-year-old too far from the bathroom, and she hoped his manners would last him till she finished.