The Ozark trilogy

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  If she could be killed. Could she? He did not know even that, and he laid his forehead on his arms and wept with rage and the despair of utter frustration. He might as well of wished to rid himself of his heart! No-that at least he could have torn from his breast. He did not know where the place that Responsible of Brightwater befouled within him was.

  Responsible stood quietly in the darkness, alert for any sounds that might mean someone had seen her SNAP out of nowhere and would be coming along to demand an explanation.

  It wasn’t likely; she stood in a tangle of trees and briars so thick she could not see her hand when she held it up before her eyes, and in her dark cloak and boots she would be invisible unless somebody stood almost within touching distance. Still, this was no time to take chances.

  Nothing but nightbirds, used to her now and gone back to their singing, and something making a soft croak in a tiny creek that was running behind her just within hearing. And that was as it should be; there was no honest reason for anybody to be lying out here in the Wilderness Lands of Arkansaw in the middle of the night. The only possibility was a party of hunters-not probable in a tangle like this, it’d make a poor campsite-or the one thing she really feared, a Gentle standing watch. Not that she knew whether they stood watch or not! Ethics, that eternal millstone round her neck; not to interfere, as promised by the treaties, meant not to observe, either; and so she knew almost nothing about the people whose peace and tranquillity she had come to preserve. It was not an ideal situation in which to work, and she considered, briefly, the idea of using a Spell of Invisibility as a means of making certain that the ignorance stayed mutual.

  No, she decided. Spells were not a part of Formalisms & Transformations, they fell into Granny Magic, and mixing levels was a sure way to get into a mess. She’d just be powerfully cautious.

  Her eyes were getting used to the darkness now, as far as that was possible in this tomb of branches and thorns and roots, and she unrolled the pliofilm map, no bigger than her palm, that she was carrying in the left-hand pocket of her cloak. It showed all of Arkansaw, but that didn’t concern her; the part that interested Responsible was the part that glowed dimly, barely above the level of darkness. A line, running round and bordering off the Wilderness Lands; and then eleven tiny x’s, marking each of the entrances to the territory that was the rightful domain of the Gentles. She must ward each and every one of those entrances.

  Technically, she could of done it by Coreference alone, working with the tiny map. But equally technically, it shouldn’t have been required at all. The Gentles should have been safe from the Families for all time, just because they were Ozarkers, and their word pledged. Just because of privacy. The Gentle T’an K’ib, coming to Responsible in the night to present her complaints, had not felt that to be any guarantee of the security of her people.

  No, she would ward each entrance on the actual spot it held on the surface of the land, all eleven one at a time, SNAPPING from the first to the last. And it was time she began. The Twelve Gates grant she did not land right on top of some Gentle, out doing whatever it was that Gentles might do in the darkness, or find herself sharing a bedroll with an astonished hunter. Accuracy was not going to be a simple matter in this murk and with the limited information she had available.

  Three hours it took her, moving from x to x, carefully, silently, until she had completed the circle and stood at the first one once again. Now each of the entrances was marked by the asterisk that means FORBIDDEN, laid in six overlapping lines of the holy sands. Three lines of white sand, three lines of ebony, alternating to form the six-pointed star, so: *. That should cause any ordinary citizen, happening to approach an entrance either accidentally or deliberately, to feel a sudden disinclination to move one step closer that could not be overcome by any effort of will.

  And then, against not the ordinary citizen but some Magician or Magician of Rank bent upon mischief, or made curious by the repelling effect of the asterisk, she had set yet another ward at each-the double-barred arrow of the Transformations, slashed through with a diagonal line. Golden sand for the arrow; silver sand for the slash that said THE TRANSFORMATION DOES NOT APPLY and would keep anybody skilled in magic from removing her asterisks by a Deletion Transformation.

  Over all the devices of sand she had poured sacred water from the flagons, so that they sank into the earth and could no longer be seen, but were bound there irrevocably by the power of the waters. Perhaps the Out-Cabal had ways of undoing such a warding-they claimed to have, bragging and threatening through the Mules, calling the Ozark magic bungling and primitive. But it was not against the Out-Cabal that she had promised to protect the Gentles, and no Ozarker, whatever his or her level of skill at magic, could undo what she had done. And nobody had seen or heard her, neither human nor Gentle. If the small people, down in their caves, had somehow heard her moving about and were to come up in the dawn to investigate the sound, they would find nothing; there would be nothing to see, nothing to sense. The wards were set for them; they would not be affected by their presence in the earth.

  She tried to think; had she forgotten anything? There was a last step, but once it was done she would no longer have the power to make changes if anything had been neglected.

  She checked it off on her fingers. Eleven entrances, eleven asterisks, eleven signs that said FORBIDDEN. Eleven entrances, eleven slashed arrows, eleven signs that said THE TRANSFORMATION DOES NOT APPLY. Twenty-two signs; water from the sacred desert spring poured over every sandgrain that formed them, the whole branded into the land. She could not see what else there could be to do, and she was tired; when she had first planned this, she had never considered that she’d have it all to do by herself alone. She’d thought a few of the Magicians of Rank would be with her, giving her aid, making it a minor effort.

  That was before the discovery that a Magician of Rank could turn his magic against a Granny. It was natural that they should attack her, Responsible of Brightwater, they had reason to hate her-but harm a Granny? It was unthinkable, it was a tear in the fabric of magic, and she trusted them no longer. And she was weary, weary . . . which was no excuse for carelessness. Deliberately, she pinched the sensitive skin at the base of her thumb till she was certain beyond question that she was alert.

  And then she moved to the final act that would complete her task and some left over. One flagon of water she still had, one small shammybag of sand all of silver. Carefully she prepared her Structural Index, using the little map with its glowing border and its eleven x points. Scrupulously, she prepared the Structural Change, specifying all eleven points of Coreference rigorously. The sharp point of her silver dagger cut it all into the earth at her feet, laid bare of its layer of thick leaves and protesting tiny crawlers and wigglers. In the glow of the map she made sure there was no character of the formal orthography not cut clean and clear and deep. The weariness moved over her in sluggish waves as she worked, and she knew there would be no SNAPPING back to her room until she had rested. She would be lucky if she had strength enough to get her over the water and onto Brightwater land, under some convenient bush that would hide her while she slept a little while.

  Responsible of Brightwater stood then, and traced the doublebarred arrow in the air, where it hung, quivering and golden, throbbing with its stored energy held back only by her skill, between her two hands.

  “There!” she whispered, and released it.

  It was a Movement Transformation; the arrow sped straight for the line that bordered the Gentles’ holdings and raced round its perimeter in a blinding streak of gold, faster than the eye could follow it, out of her sight. She knew where it was going, though she could no longer watch its progress; a few seconds later she saw it again, coming back, and it plunged to the ground at her feet and winked out in the darkness.

  Now, it was done. Well and truly done. Not only had she warded the entrances themselves, so that no Ozarker would be capable of passing them, but she had linked the wards one to another to make
of them a ring of wards. If that was not invulnerable, if it did not represent a full keeping of her promise to T’an K’ib, then doing so was beyond any skill known to Ozark. It should be invulnerable, and no way for any Gentle ever to know that what guarded them was the magic they so abhorred. There was nothing left to give the secret away, and there was no living soul that knew what she had done, to tell them. It was done, over, accomplished.

  If all her blood had been drawn from her veins she could not have been more weak, but she must get safely off Arkansaw before she let herself rest. She was aware that she shivered in the warm summer night and that she had bitten nearly through her lower lip, forcing herself not to fall, not to close her eyes.

  She SNAPPED, sorry now she had not brought a Mule, clearing the coast of Marktwain but not reaching the borders of Brightwater, and fell unconscious in a patch of brush back of a goatbarn somewhere inside McDaniels Kingdom. She was past caring if the farmer found her there before she woke.

  Chapter 17

  The Magicians of Rank SNAPPED in one by one on their Mules, even the four from Castle Traveller, not more than half a dozen minutes apart. They made a spectacle in the courtyard of Castle Wommack in their elaborate robes of office; and the nine Mules were not your average Mule. The stablemen that led the animals off to be rubbed down and watered and fed did so with a wary eye and a delicate touch. Feisty creatures these were, and accustomed to special treatment, including a ration of dark ale with their grain. Treated with anything less than the respect they considered their due, they’d been known to kick an unwary staffer right out a stable door with one contemptuous stroke of a back hoof. The men circled them gingerly, doing their best to stay out of range while at the same time accomplishing all the necessary attentions. The fact that the Mules were obviously hugely amused by it all didn’t make it any easier.

  When it was all over, and everybody safely out of the stables, the men had much to say about animals getting above theirselves, and how a whack with a two-by-four right between the ears would of done this or that one a lot of good-but they waited till the Mules were safely stalled and the stable a hundred yards behind them before they let any such talk escape them.

  “Howsomever,” pointed out one of the men, “I’d rather deal with the Mules than with that lot.” And he jerked his head toward the Castle entry, with its doors thrown wide, where the nine distinguished visitors were still standing in a huddle waiting for things to begin.

  “Right you are,” said another. “They give me the shivers, the whole nine of ‘em. And the sooner we’re out of their sight the better, I say. Unless there’s one of youall as fancies getting changed into a billy goat, or SNAPPED off to Castle Purdy ‘cause they don’t like the look of him.”

  “What are they doing here anyway?”

  The man that had expressed the strong preference for Mules over Magicians of Rank shrugged. “Can’t say,” he answered, “but Lewis Motley Wommack sent for ‘em. Sent an Attendant off on a Mule to Mizzurah, that’s got a Magician of Rank of its own, and got him to SNAP the invitation round to all the rest.”

  “And they came?”

  “Well, you see ‘em there, don’t you? Like a pack of fancy birds, to my mind, more’n men.”

  “You’d be better off to watch your mouth,” said the oldest. “You know if they can hear you out here? I don’t.”

  “I just don’t understand why they came,” the first one muttered. “Who’s Lewis Motley that they should come when he calls ‘em? Now, I ask you, how do you explain that? He’s not even Master of a Castle!”

  The Magicians of Rank were a tad surprised their own selves, most of them having been convinced almost to the last minute that they would ignore the whole thing. They were busy men, important men, and they had images to maintain. But when it came down to the wire, not a one had been able to resist the invitation from the young Guardian; the wording had been irresistible. He needed their help, it had said, “in a matter involving Responsible of Brightwater, a matter that can only be attended to by Magicians of Rank, and that requires the utmost secrecy.” And here, only slightly embarrassed, they were.

  They saw one another rarely, but that didn’t keep the four from Traveller from commenting that the rest looked like a passel of females, or the passel so addressed from replying that they looked like a quartet of carrionhawks.

  Veritas Truebreed Motley made a slight change in an ancient hymn. “How many points do you expect, gentlemen,” he asked them, “for darkening the corner where you are?”

  Feebus Timothy Traveller the 11th didn’t hesitate a heartbeat. “One dozen, dear colleague!” he gave it back. “One dozen exactly!”

  “Darkness,” added Nathan Overholt Traveller the 101st gravely, “is a prerequisite for the perception of color. If we four weren’t here, you five could not be seen at all.”

  The two Farson brothers, Sheridan Pike the 25th and Luke Nathaniel the 19th, smiled that very limited smile that Castle Traveller allowed its residents, and moved closer to the other two. They had the solidarity that comes of fanaticism, and would be formidable if they chose to be. The other five, lacking that useful characteristic, moved uneasily away from them and pretended to be very busy discussing matters of great importance.

  So it was that when Gilead of Wommack came down the steps to invite them up to the Meeting Room, she was treated to the sight of two clusters of magnificently garbed males. The Traveller contingent in its deadly black relieved only by the silver clasps that caught the folds of their robes at the shoulder. And the other five bearing the colors of their Family lines-Smith, Motley, Lewis, Guthrie, and McDaniels. But Gilead of Wommack was not interested in their costumes, not even in the Farson brothers’ strange acceptance of the Traveller black instead of the red, gold, and silver that was rightfully theirs by birth. She knew more about Magicians of Rank than that-it was their hands that you watched, their clever swift fingers and their supple wrists. That was where the danger lay, and where it would of stayed if you’d dressed them in feedbags and put milkpails on their heads.

  “Welcome to Castle Wommack,” said Gilead briskly, determined not to appear intimidated. She’d seen them all at the aborted Jubilee, and they hadn’t eaten her alive; no reason to think they would do so here under her own roof.

  “Thank you, Gilead of Wommack,” said Shawn Merryweather Lewis the 7th of Castle Motley, him that’d been kind enough to carry the message to the others. “We are ready to see your . . . Guardian . . . when he is ready for us-but would you remind him that we are busy men? We’d like to get on with this.”

  “Follow me, please,” Gilead replied. “He’s waiting upstairs in the Meeting Room.”

  “We’re your guests,” put in Feebus Timothy Traveller, “but there’s something that must be said. This innovation-this title of `Guardian’ rather than `Master’ as custom dictates-we don’t approve of it, not one of us. A Castle without Master or Missus; that’s not proper, Gilead. Granny Leeward has asked that we express her objections in the strongest terms, and we concur.”

  Gilead was not a formidable woman, and she still bore the silent displeasure of the two Grannys; but she was no coward, and she was a true Six-her loyalty to her Family and her devotion to its members were her ruling qualities. She faced the Travellers, all nodding their solemn agreement, and she spoke up clear and confident.

  “At least,” she said, looking them straight in the eyes, “this Kingdom will never have a Pope!”

  They drew back from her, white and furious; that had struck home, and it told her a few things worth passing along to the Grannys later. Jacob Jeremiah Traveller, all alone at Booneville on Tinaseeh with nobody to challenge his authority for thousands of miles, and no comset to grant anybody an occasional peek at his doings, must be busy demonstrating to the people of his Kingdom what a heavy yoke a burning faith could be.

  “And how are we to address this . . . youngster?” spat Feebus Timothy.

  “Try `Mister Wommack,”‘ she said pertly. “O
r just `Lewis Motley’-he doesn’t suffer from delusions of grandeur, gentlemen:’ And she turned her back on the two groups before the tension could grow any worse, or her traitorous knees fail her, and led them after her, feeling ice between her shoulder blades at the idea of what those nine pairs of hands might be doing that she could not see. Just as well she could not see, if they were in fact about their mysterious flickering business; she wouldn’t see it coming, whatever it was, and she’d no desire to.

  But nothing happened; and they were at the Meeting Room door, where one Senior Attendant stood casually with folded arms, waiting. “Here,” Gilead said to him, “are the nine Magicians of Rank of this planet, come to see Lewis Motley. Will you take them in, please?”

  Lewis Motley Wommack sat at the head of the table, smiling at them as they came through the door. He wore the Wommack seagreen, a color that was as appropriate to his copper hair and beard as it was to the sands of the beach. The long narrow robe was of a soft woven stuff suitable for the summer heat; it had no collar and no cuffs, just the elegant sweep of a well-cut and well-sewn garment, and the Wommack crest on a heavy enameled pendant hung round his neck on a leather thong. On his right hand was a gold ring with the same crest, and his feet were clad in plain low boots of green-dyed leather, narrow-cuffed. He sat in a worn heavy chair at the head of a small round table, and that was all. And the sum of it was wholly regal.

  It was not what the Magicians of Rank had expected.

  “Should you lose your youthful figure, Lewis Motley Wommack,” said Sheridan Pike Farson the 25th to break the speculative silence, “that garment you wear will become something of an embarrassment.”

  The young man gave him a long considering look, and Sheridan Pike was astonished to discover that he felt rebuked. He had not experienced those eyes before; Responsible of Brightwater could have told him something of the dangers they posed.