The Ozark trilogy Page 13

  And the boy had it right. There was no such thing as a unicorn, not on Old Earth, not on Ozark, and what sat before me was only an illusion. But it was beautifully formed. About eleven inches high, not counting the gleaming single horn all fluted and spiraled, as pure white as new snow, with its flawless tiny hoofs delicately poised in the soup broth and its beautiful eyes perfectly serene, soup or no soup. It even had about its neck a tiny bridle of gold, with a rosette of silver.

  “That now,” said Granny Twinsorrel, “you’ll not touch! That’s torn it. Just put your silver spoon in the bowl, Responsible of Brightwater.”

  The children were crying out that that would kill it, and Rozashara of McDaniels was reassuring them that you can’t kill what doesn’t exist, and Salem Sheridan looked grimmer than a lot of large rocks I’d seen in my time.

  Like a soapbubble, the instant my silver spoon touched the soup, the creature disappeared with an almost soundless pop. I sat there thinking, while Boy Salem—who had mightily wanted to keep the little unicorn, and I didn’t blame him, I would of liked to have it my own self—was comforted. The Granny picked up the offending bowl and handed it to the servingmaid, who looked scared to death but managed to ask, “Shall I try again, then?”

  “One minute,” said the Granny. “Just keep your places and hold on. I intend to have my supper this night, and have it in peace.”

  She plunged her hand deep into her skirt pocket—which showed me she’d either been prepared for at least some of this or always went prepared, just in case—and pulled out wards enough to seal off a good-sized mansion. The noses of the children quivered some at the reek of the garlic, and I.didn’t blame them. I was sorry I dared not take off the smell ... but we’d had scandal enough, I judged, for one evening. Garlic that didn’t smell and worked nonetheless would have been an offense to decency, and we’d just have to put up with the current odoriferous situation for the sake of the little ones.

  When every door and window was properly warded the Granny went back to her chair and sat down.

  “Now,” she said, “let us begin again, before we all starve and none of the food left’s fit to eat. Let the soup be served, and give Responsible of Brightwater a different bowl again, and put fresh hot broth in everybody else’s.”

  “The Granny’s put out,” said the servingmaid in my ear, as if I couldn’t of seen that for myself, and she set down a fresh bowl of soup at my place. Where it stayed soup, though I took my first bite gingerly, I had no interest in something like a mouthful of live worms and straight pins.

  “Responsible of Brightwater,” said Salem Sheridan Lewis then, all of us sedately eating our soup, “because I approve of the Confederation of Continents, and because I despise mischief—not to mention treason—I approve of this Quest of yours. Our Granny has explained clear enough the manner in which it must be done and the reasoning behind it—and as I say, I approve. But I’ll be right pleased when you are safely home again and we Families can go back to a normal way of life. Unlike Boy Salem there, I don’t care for this sort of thing ... it stinks of evil as well as the garlic.”

  Another apology seemed in order, and I made it, but he waved it aside.

  “You’re doing what’s necessary,” he said, “and from what we’ve heard—and seen!—it hasn’t been pleasant for you so far No need for you to be sorry for doing your plain duty.”

  Rozasham of McDanieIs paused between two bites and looked at Granny Twinsorrel.

  “Granny,” she asked, “is Responsible in any danger? Any real danger I mean, not just folderols like this exhibition at my table?”

  “Don’t ask, Rozasham,” said Granny, “you’ll only rattle cages. Just eat your supper.”

  “There’s berry pie,” somebody said, and I was glad to hear it. It would take more than a few creepy-crawlies in broth to spoil my pleasure in berry pie.

  “What I won’t do,” Salem Sheridan Lewis went on, as if nothing had been said in between, “is have any celebration of all this. It does not strike me as seemly in any way, and I won’t have it.”

  “But, my dear—” Rozasham began, or tried to begin; he went right on without so much as pausing.

  “I know the conditions,” he said. “I know there must be some mark of your visit, and I’ll not interfere with the course of things by denying you that. But it will not be a playparty, or a festivity, or a hunt—nothing that implies I enjoy or condone such devilment as we’ve just watched. Tomorrow morning, after an ordinary breakfast—properly warded, if you please, Granny Twinsorrel, and no frogs in the gravy for my breakfast biscuits, thank you!—after a perfectly ordinary breakfast, we will have a parade. A solemn, I might say, a dignified, parade. Three times round the Castle, three times round the town, with Responsible riding between me and Rozasham. That satisfactory, Responsible of Brightwater?”

  “Quite satisfactory,” I said. “But I’d like to put in a word.”

  “Go right to it.”

  “I understand your feeling about what happened just now, but I’m not at all sure that it’s got anything to do with wickedness.”

  What I meant was that I was a lot more convinced that I could lay all this to Granny Golightly and her Magician of Rank hotting up my Quest for me than to the traitor behind the misuse of magic on Brightwater. But Salem Sheridan Lewis was not interested in my opinions.

  “Magic,” he said, looking at me like a bug on a pin beneath his gaze, “is for certain purposes. Crops. Healing. Weather. Dire peril. Naming. It is not for the usage we saw it given at this table, and I’ll have in the Reverend and the Granny both as soon as you’re gone to clean out the last trace of it. I have no trouble atall recognizing sin when I see it, young woman.”

  I held my tongue.

  “Now,” he went on, “this parade. We’ll begin at seven sharp, and anybody not there on the mark will be left behind. Is that clear? Not to mention what will happen to any such person when we get back—I want our support set out unmistakable for all to see, and be done with it.”

  “You stand for the Confederation, then?” I asked, while the berry pie was being handed round. It might not of been necessary, but I liked my knots well tied, and this was a man of strong opinions.

  “Responsible of Brightwater,” said the Master of Castle Lewis, in a voice like the thud of an iron bell-clappel; “if every last turntail Kingdom on this planet votes against us, Castle Lewis stands for the Confederation. We’ll be at the Jubilee, never you fear. And our votes where they belong.”

  “Hurrah!” shouted Boy Salem. Unfortunately. An Attendant scooped him out of his chair like a sea creature out of its shell, and off he went—reasonably quietly—under the young man’s sturdy arm. There was apparently a standard procedure in these cases.

  I rested easy that night at Castle Lewis. Granny Twinsorrel warded my room double, and my nose had grown dulled to the garlic by the time I finally found myself in one of the high hard narrow beds the Lewises considered regulation. Not even a dream to disturb me. But the sun that came flooding through my windows in the morning woke me early enough; and when Tambrey of Motley knocked at my door with my wake-up tea she found me already in my traveling dress, sitting sedately in a cedar rocker waiting for her, and only my bare feet to show I’d not been up long.

  I drank the tea slowly, enjoying the peacefulness of the morning, and the well-run propriety—a tad constraining, but well-run—of this Castle, and gave over my thinking to how I’d doll Sterling up for this parade. It had to be elegant, and it needed to be memorable, but I must not overdo it or I’d offend my host. It was a neat little problem, and the kind of thing I liked to ponder over, a good way to begin a morning.

  I settled finally on something a bit beyond what Salem Sheridan Lewis would of liked, and a bit less than what Sterling would have—she was vain, even for a Mule. Rosettes in her ears in the Brightwater colors, and streamers braided in her tail—which I could triple-loop, for good measure—and me in my splendiferous traveling garb.

  We we
nt three times round the Castle, and three times round the town, as specified, the people lining the streets in Sundy best and cheering us on our way, holding up the babies to gawk at the glitter going by. Salem Sheridan even unbent so far as to put a single Attendant at the head of the parade with a silver horn, and allowed him to blow one long note at every third corner.

  But I did not get to hear Rozasham of McDaniels sing even one ballad, not even one hymn, though I asked politely enough as we returned from our three times round. That would have been too much like frivolity to suit either Rozasham’s husband, or Granny Twinsorrel, or for that matter; Eben Nathaniel Lewis the 17th.

  “She sings in church,” said Salem Sheridan, “and does a very good job of it. And that’s sufficient.”

  It was days like this that I could see the advantages of the single state most clearly.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE PARTY THE PURDYS gave for me went very well—I threw in a little something here and there, of my own, to make sure it would. The pies that would of gotten salt in place of sugaring didn’t after all—that got noticed in time. And the beer that had gone flat because somebody left it sitting out overnight acquired some new bubbles in a way that wasn’t strictly natural. And when Donovan Hihu Purdy the 40th got his boot toe under a rough spot in the rug and was headed for a broken hip sure as an egg’s got no right angles, he managed to land— without doing her any harm, and in fact she looked as if she rather enjoyed it—in the lap of a woman of fine substantial size. Instead of flat out on the floor

  What I was doing was known as meddling, and it was not looked on with any special favor One of the first things a girl learned in Granny School, right there at the beginning with keeping your legs crossed and how not to scorch milk, was “Mind your own business and leave other people be.” I hadn’t forgotten.

  Howsomever; I was fed up to here by that time with listening to every clattering tongue on Ozark meanmouthing the Purdys.

  My tolerance had been first reached and then exceeded. I had even realized, a lot more belatedly than did me any credit, that I was guilty of the same thing myself. Taking that silly Ivy of Wommack for a Purdy, for instance, for no other reason than that she was silly and looked like she didn’t eat right. There was a name for it all, and not a very nice name either— Prejudice, that was its ugly name.

  And I’d had time to muse some on the essential meanness of human beings. Isolated as they were, the Twelve Families had had no people of black skin among them, nor any of brown or yellow, either. Probably there was a smidgen of Cherokee blood someplace, from the long-ago days, but it had hundreds of years since disappeared in the inundation of Scotch, Welsh, and Irish genes that the Ozarkers carried. Only the brown eyes here and there had survived our outrageous whiteness. And so, lacking anybody colored differently than ourselves to make our scapegoat, we’d picked the Purdys out for the role.

  And of course they filled it, once elected, which encouraged everybody to go on with it. Naturally they did. Nothing is more sure to make you spill the tray you’re carrying than knowing for certain and certain that everybody’s just watching you and waiting for you to do that. Waiting so they can look at each other; and all of them be thinking, even if they scruple to say it:

  “Purdys! Really, they beat all!”

  As I say, I’d gotten a bellyful of that, and it was on my list of things to be tackled when I got some leisure again. High time we took some Purdy daughters in hand and taught them what a self-fulfilling prophecy was, and how to go about canceling one.

  We had a fine party, therefore. The food was good, including those pies, and the drink was good, and the bouquet presented to me with a nice rhyme on the Castle bandstand by three little girls of just the sort I had in mind was fresh and beautiful. The one sprig of blisterweed I saw behind a red daisy I threw over the bandstand railing without anybody seeing me, and I had my leather gloves on at the time. No harm done, and an easy job later getting the poisonous oil off the glove.

  The Purdys were plainly worried about how much the Parsons and the Guthries had seen fit to tell me of then recent doings, and I saw no harm in that. I dropped hints; and one by one they took me aside to confess some piece of foolishness and tell me how much they regretted it. Which is good for the soul, the stomach, and the disposition.

  By the time it was all over, and me tucked up in my bed—an ample bed, for a welcome change, that a person could stretch out in it without falling off on the floor—the Purdys were fairly glowing. They’d done themselves proud, and done me honor; and nothing had Gone Wrong. And you could see what a new and delightsome feeling that was for them.

  I lay there and reviewed it in my mind as I fell asleep, and I was well satisfied. It was a start, and I’d carry it further when I got home. As for treason ... not the Purdys. They were doing well to just get through the ordinary day, without introducing any magical complications.

  And then the Gentle came to me in the night, and woke me with full formality. I was not expecting that.

  “Responsible of Brightwater,” it said at my bedside, “you who bear the keys and keystones, daughter of all the Grannys and mother of all the Magicians and all the Magicians of Rank—awaken and speak with me!”

  I can’t say I was addressed like that often. It brought me bolt upright instantly, clutching the bedclothes. There’d been a Responsible of Brightwater hundreds of years ago who’d perhaps been called all those things, and may have deserved them, for all I knew, but it was a new experience for me, and my teeth needed brushing, and I had not the first faintest notion what I was supposed to say. This constituted a kind of diplomatic exchange between two humanoid races, and for sure required all the formality there was going, but how exactly did you be formal in your nightgown and all mussed and grubby from sleep, and taken wholly and entirely by surprise?

  I’m ashamed to say that I settled for, “Dear goodness, just a minute, please!” and added, “I shall return at once,” for good measure, hoping that at least sounded hifalutin, and bolted for the dressingroom that went with my guestchamber in Castle Purdy. There wasn’t time to change the nightdress, but I did add my shawl and tend to my hair and teeth and face, and I was back in my bed propped up on the pillows for audience before the Gentle could of counted to twenty-four. Nervous, but I was there.

  This was a real Gentle, no baby trick like the Skerry on the well curb; and it was waiting for me patiently, standing there beside my bed in silence, till I should collect myself and respond in some sensible fashion. I saw that it was a female— she, then, was waiting for me patiently. I searched my memory for the old phrases, and prayed they’d be the right ones.

  “I am happy to see you, dear friend of the Twelve Families,” I began, “more happy than I can say.” Was that right? I hoped so. “And may I know how you are called?”

  She told me, and I found I could say it competently enough. Her name was T’an K’ib; not too difficult for an Ozarker tongue. It was for the sake of our rare speech with the Gentles that we had added the glottal stop to our Naming alphabet all those many years ago; for all the sounds of their language except that one the alphabet of Old Earth served well enough. (Not that the Gentles were interested in their name-totals, despising all magic and anything to do with magic as they did. But it delighted First Granny to put a twenty-seventh letter in the alphabet. Three nines, nine threes—much improved over the twenty-six we’d always had to make do with previously.)

  “Greetings, T’an K’ib,” I said slowly, “and I beg your pardon if my words don’t come easily ... your people visit us rarely, and we have little chance for converse. You honor me; I thank you for coming and welcome you in the name of Castle Brightwater.”

  It was an honor, and no mistake. The Gentles were a people so ancient we could scarcely bring the numbers to mind; their history was said to be a matter of formal record for more than thirty thousand years. By their reckoning we Ozarkers had only just popped up on this planet like mushrooms in a badly drained yard, and we mer
ited about the same degree of attention. They considered us a backward and primitive race—and were probably right, from their perspective—and they saw us only when absolute necessity demanded. I had never seen a Gentle before, nor my mother either; I believe that Charity of Guthrie’s mother claimed to have.

  T’an K’ib wore only a hooded cloak, and wore that out of deference to Ozarker morals, I assumed. A being that is covered head to foot with soft white fur has little need for clothing. She was not quite three feet tall, if my guess was right (and I was good at judging such things), and I knew she was female because she had no beard or neckruff. Her eyes, the pupils vertical like a cat’s, were thick-lashed and the color of wood violets, the deepest purple I had ever seen in a living creature.

  We understood the Gentles, after a fashion; they were physically quite reasonable for the planet. The Skerrys, that were the only other intelligent species native to Ozark—unless you counted the Mules, and perhaps you’d better—we didn’t understand at all. Not how their skeletons supported their height; not how their metabolisms functioned; not anything about them. No one had ever found or seen or (praise the Twelve Comers) stolen a Skerry bone, but whatever its substance was it had to be something different from what held us Ozarkers upright in our skins. The Gentles, on the other hand, could be looked upon as roughly equivalent to furred Little People without wings; and we’d been well acquainted with several Little Peoples before we ever left Old Earth. The Gentles did not alarm us; we alarmed them.

  “And I greet you in the name of all the Gentles,” she said to me. “We are troubled, Responsible of Brightwater; sorely troubled. I come to you on behalf of all my people to ask that you put an end to that trouble.”

  I wondered what sort of power she thought I had, to word her request like that, and doubted she would of known what to make of me peeling pans of potatoes at Brightwater because me Granny needed all me servingmaids to gather herbs, and had set me to make certain of that day’s mashed potatoes. We had myths aplenty of the Gentles, and tales among the Teaching Stories; it looked as though they might also have myths of us. The idea that I figured in those myths, and maybe prominently, made me uneasy.