The Ozark trilogy

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  “If you don’t ask,” she cautioned, “I won’t be obliged to refuse you.

  “Where did you go?” he continued, determined to gain as much as he could. “Near on three hours you were gone, Responsible of Brightwater-where were you?”

  She was silent, except for the laughing; and he sighed and dragged himself out of her bed before he could fall asleep in it. He wasn’t going to find out by asking, she’d made that clear; and the idea of turning her into the sort of maudlin mess he was accustomed to producing, where she’d do or say anything just to keep him from leaving her side-that was ridiculous. He was young, but he wasn’t stupid.

  “I intend to find out, you know,” he told her, pulling his clothes on any old how. “I do intend to find out.”

  “Intend all you please,” she mocked him-mocked him, damn her! “I’ll not spoil your fun by telling you.”

  “And how do you know I won’t get up today in front of the Grannys and the whole world assembled, and tell them that you disappear in the night on a Mule, and have the power to lay silence on the creatures, and make something indescribable of the act of love?”

  She was calm as a pond. “I know that,” she answered, “because first of all that would put an end to your fun, for sure and for certain-you’d never find anything out that way. And secondly, because for all the wickedness you so pride yourself on, young Wommack, you have a code of honor of your own-and it doesn’t include tattling. You’d never stoop to that.”

  “Might could be I’d see it as my duty as a citizen to speak up,” he said, struggling with his hood. “If there’s anything I can’t abide, you know, it’s failing in my duty as a citizen.”

  “Like Jeremiah Thomas Traveller?” she teased. “Burdened with the truth and heavy of heart, but oh, law, you asked the Holy One Almighty if you should tattle and the answer came back YES! and it came back again YES!”

  He closed her door behind him as loudly as he dared, leaving her still chuckling on her drenched narrow bed among the pillows, and limped desperately toward his rooms and a scalding shower. He was by no means confident he’d live through this day, nor certain he cared to; and the Gates help anybody that crossed him till he’d had a chance at some sleep.

  When Jewel of Wommack stuck her head out her door at him as he passed it he said only, “Don’t chance it!” and she popped it right back in again without another word.

  Chapter 8

  Responsible sat at her desk, the private account books before her, and worked, doggedly. It was work that had needed doing before she had left the Castle in February; it was work that needed doing now; and it would make an excellent device for forcing the hours of this day to go by.

  At nine o’clock sharp she’d tuned her comset for automatic printout, and she would not miss one word spoken. The speeches and their rebuttals, the Chair’s summary and the results of the voting-assuming they got to the voting today, which was not all that likely-would be transcribed silently onto pliofilm and deposited in the comset slot where her copy of the day’s news still lay unread. She had waked up that morning, an hour after Lewis Motley Wommack left her bed, to the sound of a late spring rain drumming on the roof and against the north windows, and usually that would of been her idea. of an ideal setting to curl up in her bed with the news-sheet and her pot of tea. But she’d had no stomach for the “news” this morning. None of what had happened at Confederation Hall would be news to her-except the things that mattered most but would not be printed on the pliofilm. And anything new that had happened beyond the narrow focus of her present interest, anything that was of importance and might deserve her attention, she did not want to know about right now. She had no attention left to give such things, and would do a slapdash cattywampus job of tending to them-far better to have them wait till this meeting was over and she knew where matters stood.

  She was tired, from tension and from lack of sleep; the shower she’d had before her tea had not driven away the gritty feeling under her eyelids nor the ache in her muscles. Nevertheless, she sat at her desk and she studied the columns of figures, forcing them not to blur by squinting fiercely until she added a headache toher other problems and was tempted-just slightly tempted-to squander a Spell or two on her self.

  “Pay attention, Responsible,” she told herself sternly, “and don’t be such a frail little flower.” A good hard pinch would wake her up fairly effectively, and save the energy she might well need for real magic before this week was over. She applied the pinch, swore softly, and looked again at the columns of numbers.

  There was, for example, the one hundred thirteen dollers entered under the ambiguous heading “Herbs Needed.” Herbs needed by whom? For what? And how could anybody spend one hundred thirteen dollers on herbs at one time? The Grannys gathered their own herbs, as did she and the Magicians; only the Magicians of Rank were considered so busy that their herbs must be provided for them by others.

  She laid down her stylus, cross at the ambiguous entry, cross that she hadn’t demanded details when it had come through on the private budget line in the first place, and went to the comset. She punched in the computer locations for the budget category, seven numbers in sequence, and the infowindow lit up for readout on such matters as the cost of goatfeed and Mule blankets in the month of April 3012, which was not yet quite what she wanted. The restricted access code numbers switched the computer’s search to the areas that interested her.

  She typed in the date of the entry, the words, and then, AMPLIFY.

  GAILHERB EIGHTY DOLLERS EVEN

  BENISONWEED THIRTY-THREE DOLLERS EVEN

  SOURCE MIARKTWAIN WILDERNESS,

  NORTHEAST EDGE, 2119.4 BY 941.0 APPROX

  GOAL CASTLE AIRY

  BENEFICIARY CHARITY OF GUTHRIE

  The readout winked off, Bashed once more as a concession to her human frailties, and winked off, leaving the word WAITING behind.

  Responsible thought about it.

  IS REPEAT DESIRED? The computer was short on patience.

  She ignored it, and thought some more. Then she typed in: DISPLAY ALL OTHER DETAILS RE ENTRY.

  ALL DETAILS DISPLAYED. WAITING.

  “Wait, then,” said Responsible, and turned it off. She was satisfied. Charity of Guthrie, widowed Mistress of Castle Airy, took in every damaged creature that Ozark produced. Any citizen involved in some shabby Family altercation that would not bear the light of day or of the courts; any girl suffering the nine-month effects of careless love; any young person unable to face the long haul up through the world from servingmaid or apprentice or hired man to heading an independent household; any weak or shamed or injured or frightened person, anyone simply in need of refuge, could be sure of a warm welcome at Castle Airy. And three Grannys lived under that roof, to help Charity live up to her name. If she’d felt she needed one hundred and thirteen dollers worth of gailherb and benisonweed, so be it.

  Responsible checked the item off and went on to the next one. And then her stylus slowed as she wondered . . . had any of the Twelve Kingdoms planned ahead, against the possibility that the Confederation would fall and they would no longer be able to depend upon Brightwater for such things as herbs? It was very simple for them now; whatever their Castles required, they punched in their order on their comsets and it arrived by supply freighter. And in an emergency, there’d be Veritas Truebreed Motley the 4th, Brightwater’s own Magician of Rank, SNAPPING in on his Mule with the supplies in his saddlebags almost before the person asking had stopped entering the order. The Castles had been taking that for granted for hundreds of years now, like the weather; might some of them have thought about preparing for a new kind of winter?

  Sure enough. The computers told her, as they’d have told her sooner if she’d had sense enough to ask. In the last six months there’d been a steady series of orders in from Castle Traveller. Herbs, they’d ordered, both healing and magic. Magic supplies in abundance. Bags of the holy sands from Marktwain’s desert, and flagons of the sacred water from its desert
spring. Lengths of fine cloth needed for the ceremonies of the Magicians and the Magicians of Rank. Gold cloth for the sails permitted only to the small silver ships of the Magicians of Rank. Unguents and potions; musical instruments and bolts of velvet; silver horseshoes and silver daggers. And coarse salt, in huge amounts.

  The list was too long to represent genuine need, and she ought to of seen it; but they’d been clever about it. A little here, a little there, and all of it scrambled to look like the ordinary orders of a busy Castle . . . Only when the computers had it neatly sorted and totaled could you see what they were up to. They’d been stockpiling, had the Travellers, hoarding all those items they might find themselves hard put to locate for a while if they didn’t have Brightwater to call upon.

  The hypocrisy of it made Responsible’s mouth twitch. Independence! Oh, yes. Stand on your own feet, be boones, be true men; no more hiding behind the skirts of Brightwater. But first, be very sure you’ve bled Brightwater of all the necessities for that independence.

  Castles Guthrie and Farson, on the other hand, that ought to have been doing the same thing, had put in nothing more than a few routine orders. They were so obsessed with the details of the fool wrangling going on on Arkansaw that they’d had no time to spare for the obvious. Responsible had no illusions that they would of refrained from hoarding on any kind of moral grounds.

  She typed in rapid instructions; there would be no more deliveries of supplies to Tinaseeh, nothing else to Castle Traveller, that did not have her personal approval. She’d not have a legitimate need neglected, but neither would she allow Castle Traveller to strengthen their hands any further at Brightwater’s expense.

  Noon passed, and still she worked, and the soft hiss as each filled sheet of pliofilm landed in the OUT slot on the comset never stopped; they were working right on through dinner, then, at the Hall. She kept grimly to her figures and her bits of data, refusing the temptation to take a look now and then at the words that might be on those sheets. There were only a few alternatives, and as her magic had truly told her, every one of them carried trouble with it. Should the Confederation stand, there would be trouble: the anti-Confederationists’ resentment would be greatly increased by their defeat, and by their public humiliation at the Jubilee. The plotting, the niggling attempts to undermine the assembly, the constant dragging of feet when action was needed, would go right on as they had all these years, disrupting the equilibrium of Ozark.

  Should the Confederation fall, there would be trouble: twelve sovereign states to establish themselves, to construct alliances and formal relationships one with another-a way of life entirely new and untried. And then there was the possibility about which she could make no reliable prediction: the most militant of the antiConfederationists-say, the Travellers, the Farsons, and the Guthries-they might simply secede. That was also possible, if things did not go their way, and if the problem of saving face seemed to them heavier than the consequences of secession.

  At which point she realized that her method of concentrating on her work and refusing to think about these things was to run them round and round her mind, thinking all the time, “I absolutely refuse to think about what will happen if . . .”

  “Dozens!” she said out loud, and then, “Bloody oozing Dozens!” If there was a worse oath than that one, she didn’t know it; if there was any justice, she’d be struck dead here where she sat, and then she wouldn’t have to worry about any of it any longer. “As I sow, so shall I reap?” she demanded of the universe in general. “How about You doing a little reaping, now I’ve done so benastied much sowing?”

  The small message bell on her comset rang then, a poor substitute for the bolt of lightning she was lusting after; there was a message for her. No doubt the Farsons wanted their rooms changed; they always did, whenever they came to visit, as a matter of principle.

  She laid down her work, doing it little harm, since she’d been paying no real attention to what she was doing for the past half hour at least, and pushed the MESSAGE stud.

  “Twelve Corners and Twelve Gates!” the thing squawked at her; she didn’t even recognize the voice. But the voice was prepared for that, which meant it had to be somebody accustomed to the vagaries of Brightwater’s low-budget communications equipment. “It’s Granny Hazelbide,” it went on. “You turn your comset on, missy, this minute-the Smiths have just demanded to be heard out of turn because, by their lights, they’ve already missed several turns-as if that was anybody’s fault but their own, but your uncle’s fallen for it-and from what I see before me, unless you look quick you’re going to miss something like you never imagined in all your borned days! And so am I if I tarry here any longer!”

  TERMINATE, said the computer.

  Responsible frowned; she had no desire to miss out on anything that had brought the Granny to that pitch of excitement, but the suggestion that anything the Smiths might say or do would be worth her time was one of the more dubious ideas she’d heard lately. A Granny tumbled over the balcony edge from leaning too close, a Junior Delegate gone berserk and racing up and down the center aisle-something like that might be interesting, but the Smiths? The Smiths were dullness raised to its utmost potential.

  Nevertheless, if Granny Hazelbide thought there was something happening, it was likely there was, and Responsible hit the proper switches. And there stood Delldon Mallard Smith the 2nd, risen to give his speech on the subject of the motion to permanently dissolve the Confederation of Continents. And his brothers, all four of them, and all four eldest sons, standing in the row alongside him-to give him moral support, no doubt.

  She scowled at his image-the man’d never said a word worth hearing in all the years of his life, if what people said of him was to be credited, and her own limited experience with him led her to believe that it was-and listened for a clue to what had had the Granny all in an uproar.

  “-that I . . . uh . . . understand from the very depths of my manhood, the utmost recesses . . . uh . . . of my soul, the plea that my distinguished colleague from Tinaseeh has made to all of us and its . . . uh . . . its significance. It strikes a chord that resonates in this breast!” And he pounded on the breast in question to demonstrate the awesome sincerity of his feelings; Responsible snickered. “But we Smiths,” he went on, “we Smiths were not taken by surprise at Castle Traveller’s move, nor do we . . . uh . . . take it lightly . . . uh . . . lightly. Knowing, knowing I say, that it was sure to come at this Jubilee-my friends, it was long overdue!-we turned our finest minds to what it must mean . . . for all of us. Not only for Castle Smith, but for every Castle on this planet. And what came to us, like a . . . uh . . . revelation! . . . was that since First Landing our people have been ignoring something of great importance. Great importance!” He paused dramatically, a great bulk in a swath of cloaks that must have been torment in the heat, and clasped his hands before him, leaning toward his audience.

  “Think!” he said. “What was it that First Granny herself said, as she waded out of the waters of the Outward Deeps and set foot on this gentle land, one . . . uh . . . one thousand years ago? Every schoolchild knows the answer to that question! She saidshe said: `Glory be! The Kingdom’s come at last!’ The Kingdom! I tell you, my friends, my colleagues, gentle ladies, citizens all over this beautiful and bounteous . . . uh . . . planet-we have missed the significance of what First Granny said for one thousand long years! For that, that was a Naming!”

  Responsible was glued to the set now, not because what he said was so fascinating but because for the life of her she could not see where it was going to lead. What could he be trying to get at?

  “Now,” he said, clearly warming to his subject, “what is a Kingdom? Is it a piece of land? Is it a building? Is it a set of . . . uh . . . coordinates? That may well sound like a simpleminded question to . . . uh . . . some of you-but I ask you, I ask you to give it some serious thought. When one of our Grannys names a girlbaby Rose, we ask ourselves-what does that mean? We add up the values of those letters
, and we look carefully and with respect at their . . . uh . . . total, and we ask ourselves-what is their significance? And we don’t call that simpleminded, for we know that Naming is serious . . . that the very . . . uh, the fabric of our lives depends upon Proper Naming! And when First Granny called this a Kingdom, what, we must ask ourselves-one thousand sorry years late!-what did she mean?”

  As any fool knew, Responsible thought, tapping her fingernail impatiently against her front teeth, she meant that we’d finally reached a homeplace and that she was fervently grateful to be off The Ship and out of the water and once more have her feet on solid ground. So?

  “I’m not going to tell you what she meant,” Delldon Mallard said, his voice heavy with layers and layers of dramatic emphasishe must have practiced, thought Responsible-”I’m going to show you!”

  For a moment she lost sight of him, as the comcrews swung their cameras round the room and up toward the balcony to give their viewers a glimpse of what was happening. On the floor of the Hall, where Delldon Mallard stood with his four brothers in their places and the four eldest sons each at their father’s elbow, an Attendant rose at every one of them’s right hand, and waited at rigid attention. And up in the balcony, the Smith women were standing, each with a servingmaid at her right hand! Marygold of Purdy, wife of Delldon Mallard and Missus of their Castle; the wives of each of the three brothers, lined up beside Marygold in the back row; and Dorothy of Smith, eldest daughter of the Castle. All over the Hall, the Smiths and their staff were standing-to do what?

  The cameras swung dizzyingly back again-the comcrews must have been flustered by the turn of events-and focused on the Master of Castle Smith. His face was the very picture of a man with grave thoughts on his mind, though Responsible doubted he’d ever had a truly grave thought, and he jerked his chin imperiously toward the Attendant that flanked him.

  Responsible watched it; but she didn’t believe it. Even seeing it with her own eyes, she thought that last night’s labors, last night’s revels, and this day’s tedium had driven the last of her senses to distraction. It could not be that she was really seeing the Attendant lift away-with a flourish-the heavy cloak that covered his Master, to reveal beneath it yet another cloak; this one of purple velvet, sweeping from the high ruff at his throat all the way to the floor and trimmed all the way round its edges and its sleeves with a foot-wide border of snowy fur. Nor could she really be seeing the magnificent velvet outfit, all tucks and smocking and studding, beneath that purple cloak, or the-yes, dear heaven, it was a scepter-suddenly in his hand!