The Ozark trilogy Read online

  Once I left the coast of Arkansaw and was beyond the shipping lanes, all the way over that vast country up almost to the edge of the town built around Castle Wommack, I saw nary a soul. There were farms—clearly very large farms, and why not?—spread out over the surface of the land. And every now and again I would see the telltale white line of a fence built of that same stone, running along the edge of a cleared field, or catch sight maybe of light glancing off solar collectors on a roof. But not until I actually neared Booneville, the capital (and only) city of Kintucky, not till I saw the Castle ahead of me, did I begin to see people. Kintucky had only been settled in 2339, just ten years before Tinaseeh, and the latest figures I had for the whole kingdom showed under seven thousand citizens living here. More than a third of those lived in or near Booneville itself.

  They met me properly at the Castle, and made me welcome; Jacob Donahue Wommack the 23rd, a widower these past two years, and his five sons and seven daughters, and numerous wives and husbands. There was a band playing as I brought Sterling down on the roadway winding up to the Castle gates, and people lining both sides throwing flowers and waving bright banners. Seven Attendants in green and silver Wommack livery followed me up the ramp and through the gates. And where I could catch glimpses of the streets and buildings of the town I saw that they’d hung garlands everywhere there was something to hang a garland on. Booneville was decked out for full festival in my honor; and I was surprised; I supposed it must come of the loneliness out here, and so few occasions for any kind of partying. Considering the hasty excuses for celebrations thrown together along my way so far, it made me smile; I tried, without any success, to imagine my cousin Anne at Castle McDaniels going to all this trouble for me, or the stern Lewises even countenancing such a fuss.

  The inner court of Castle Wommack, inside the gates, was the size of a respectable playing field; you could have raced Mules there without much inconvenience. And they had it set up for a fair; with long tables of food and drink, and strolling singers and dancers, and a whole play being put on on a stage that fit neatly into a far comer, and crowds of young people milling in their Sundy best. They led Sterling away to their stables and then turned their energies to entertaining me, with a dogged determination that was at first highly flattering. And then, after a while, it began to make me uneasy.

  I was sitting on a low bench with Jacob Donahue and three of his daughters, watching twelve couples move through an elaborate circle dance done to the tune of dulcimer; guitar, and fiddle, finishing my fourth mug of excellent dark ale and much too full from the food they’d been plying me with, when I finally realized that things were genuinely odd. True—they were celebrating my visit as no other Castle had even considered celebrating it, so far as I could tell. True—the sounds in the inner court, and those that floated in over the walls from the town, were all laughter and song and merry-making and pleasure. But there was something strange ... and then, all at once, I knew what it was.

  The broad front of Castle Wommack, five stories high of pearly white stone, forming a great muleshoe shape around that court, had windows everywhere. I took time to count those on the first story alone, and there were forty of them; multiply that by five and you got roughly two hundred windows facing on this court, give or take a dozen for variations.

  And every last blessed one of them was not only empty of the people I would of expected to see looking down on the fair and taking part from above us; it was closed tight as a tick, and shuttered.

  I clapped politely for me circle dance as it drew to its close, and clapped again for the musicians, and took time to smile at a small boy that had decided he was a juggler and was doing three pieces of fruit considerable harm right under my nose. And then I stood up, brushed off my skirts, and said: “I’ll be going in now, ladies; Jacob Donahue Wommack.”

  A daughter named Gilead, freckled and slender and twenty-odd, stood up with me. “It’s much pleasanter out here,” she said, “and I can recommend the cake they’re setting out down beside the stage; it’s extra good lightcake, and you haven’t had any of it yet, I don’t believe.”

  “The reason it’s pleasanter out here,” I said, measuring my words to make them fall with proper force, “is because whoever is in there”—I pointed to the front of the Castle proper—”is suffocating.”

  “Daddy,” said Gilead of Wommack, “I believe she’s noticed.”

  “That I have,” I snapped.

  “My dear young woman,” Jacob Donahue began, but I cut him off short.

  “I’ll be going in now,” I said. “If you care to come with me, you’re welcome; if you prefer to stay out here while your faces crack, pretending to be having fun, that’s your privilege. Youall do just as you like—but I am going inside and see what’s back of your shutters.”

  I looked at them again, row on row of heavy wooden eyes all shut tight and black against the stone, and I shuddered. A good job they’d done of keeping me distracted, that I’d sat out here for near two hours and not seen that!

  “We’ll go with you, Responsible,” said Gilead, and the other two stood to join us. “But most of these people are having fun, and I’m pleased that they are. It’s a hard life here, and not much in the way of party times—don’t let’s spoil it for them.”

  The false cheer dropped off Jacob Donahue like a scarf off a sloped shoulder as he stood up, slowly, and I could see that he was in fact wholly miserable.

  “Like Gilead says,” he told me, “we’ll come along ... but I’d be grateful if we do it without drawing any attention. I’ve no more mind to spoil the others’ day than my daughters have. You, girls, you see to it that Responsible is sort of tucked away among the rest of you, and don’t act as if we were in any hurry to get anywhere.”

  We strolled, therefore, over to the Castle and in through its front door. My feet were itching to run, as much from annoyance at my own thick head as anything else, but I did as Jacob Donahue bid, and—eventually—we were inside.

  Inside, and the door closed behind us, and the silence of an empty church. Not one laugh, not one note of music, came through those shutters, which was no doubt the intention. The fair might as well of been back on Marktwain; it did not exist inside this Castle.

  “Well, well, well,” I said, “this is a pretty pass! What’s happening here at Castle Wommack to account for this?”

  From the top of a stairway ahead of me a woman’s voice called down, and I peered up in the dimness to see if I knew the face that went with it, but it was a stranger. She wore plain enough dress to suit even the Lewises, her hair was pulled back and tucked into a kerchief, and she carried a basin of steaming liquid in her hands.

  “We’ve sickness here, young miss of Brightwater,,” she said in a bitter voice. “That’s what’s ‘happening’ here! Mr. Wommack, there’s another three taken with it just since you went out this morning, and I’m truly scared at the way Granny Goodweather looks ... I don’t know what to do for her; and the Magician says he doesn’t either—what next, I ask you, Mr. Wommack? I’m at the end of my wits!”

  “Your Granny is sick?” I asked. I was astonished. A Granny was human, of course, but it was their job to tend the sick, not lie among them. It was obligatory for a Granny to suffer from “rheumatism,” that went with the territory, but I couldn’t remember any Granny ever being really sick for more than an hour or two, or dying any other way than peacefully in her bed at an age well beyond one hundred years.

  “Both of them, miss,” said the woman on the stairs. “Granny Goodweather was taken first two days ago; and then yesterday Granny Copperdell as well ... and they’d both been poorly, I’d remarked on that.”

  I turned on the Wommacks behind me to demand of them exactly what they’d been doing about this—sick Grannys, indeed!—but one look was enough to close my mouth. They were Wommacks, that was all that was wrong with them; they’d of done nothing, or as near to nothing as couldn’t be noticed.

  The Purdys, now, were forever in some sort
of mess, and usually by their own stupidity. But they did put some effort into their actions. (They would in fact have been better off if they’d learned to put in less; usually they got themselves so entangled and benastied that it took more effort to extricate them than it would of just keeping them out of it all from the beginning.)

  With the Wommacks, it was different. They were capable people, and intelligent, and sensible. About most things, that is. So long as whatever obstacle faced the Wommacks couldn’t be laid at the door of the famous Wommack bad luck, they just turned to and took care of things. Bad luck, though, the Wommack curse, the long burden of paying and paying for the Granny that had laid out the Improper Name ... anything that seemed due to that, they just gave up on, on the principle that it was no use trying in such a situation. This, I gathered, was one of those situations.

  I tucked up my skirts then and ran up the stairs toward the woman that still stood there, the water in her basin getting colder by the passing minute, if it was water, and paid the family behind me no more mind.

  “You’re Castle staff?” I asked the laggard nurse, and she nodded.

  “Your name, please.”

  “Violet,” she said. “Violet of Smith.”

  “Very well. Violet of Smith—take me this instant to the sickroom, and let me see how bad things are in this place!”

  “Which sickroom, miss?” she asked me. “We’ve nothing but sickrooms on this whole second floor,”

  “How many are down?” I demanded, but she only shrugged.

  “I’ve lost count, miss ... might could be thirty, might could be twice that.”

  “And both your Grannys.”

  “And both our Grannys.”

  “Well, take me to Granny Copperdell, then,” I said, “and set down that basin—whatever it is, it’s no use to anybody now.”

  She turned without a word, but I had to take the useless basin from her hands myself, and I followed where she led me. I could smell the sickness now, and I wanted those windows open at the front of the Castle, and fresh air in here as fast as it could decently be accomplished.

  “Are many people sick in the town?” I asked her, wishing she’d hurry.

  “Oh no, miss,” she said. “Not in the town. Only in the Castle.”

  Hmmmph. That would be fuel for the dratted Wommack curse, of course.

  She knocked twice at a doorway, and then opened it and stood aside to let me pass, saying, “That’s Granny Copperdell there in the bed, miss, and I hope you can do something for her; for I surely can’t. And I’m too busy to stay with you, so you’ll excuse me, please.” And she was gone.

  “Well, Granny Copperdell!” I said, making it a cautious challenge. “So this is how you run things!”

  Hers was the only bed in the room, and she was tiny in it; three featherbeds under her, I was willing to wager, and half a dozen pillows propping her up in them.

  “Land, who is it bothering me now?” came from the depths of the bedclothes, and I saw an encouraging flurry. “Can’t leave an old woman to die in peace, can you? Come near me and torment me again with one of your so-called Magicians and you’ll find out if I’m sick, I warn you, and me that’s sick and tired of warning youall! Magicians! Phaugh—what’s a Magician know about healing? No more use than— Well, who be you?”

  It did my heart good. She might be sick, but she surely was not dying. She was behaving absolutely as a Granny ought to behave, and that meant I’d get useful information here at least.

  “It’s only me, Granny Copperdell, Responsible of Brightwater,” I said. “And sorry to see you so poorly. May I come sit by you there?”

  “Come ahead,” she ranted, “come right ahead! Why ask? If it’s not one sort of meanness, it’ll be another ... why can’t you stay home where you belong, ‘stead of meddling in our affairs, and tormenting an old woman as is about to draw her last breath?”

  I tried the bed, but it was impossible; you sank into the featherbeds and disappeared from sight unless you weighed no more than a Granny, and that did not apply to me.

  “You get a chair and get yourself off my bed!” she ordered me, whacking at me with a handkerchief like I was a gerdafly; and I did so gladly, pulling the chair up close beside her head.

  “Now, Granny Copperdell,” I said firmly, “there’s no need for you to keep on with your carry-on. It doesn’t impress me, and I’ll be no use here if I don’t hear some sense and hear it quick.”

  “Likely,” she said. “Likely!”

  “Granny, you know I’m right,” I said, “you a Brightwater by birth; and every Castle on this planet knows quite well why I’m traveling round it. You’re in a wild place here for sure, but this high up the reception on your comsets is certain to be perfect. You know why I’m here!”

  “Took you long enough,” she muttered.

  “No comset on my Mule, Granny,” I said. “I’ve been four days, and all of them long days, flying here, and I’ve landed only to make my camp and sleep; I’ve had no news. If I’d known there was trouble here I’d not of stopped for anything.”

  She sighed then, and settled back, and I plumped up her pillows for her,

  “Speak up. Granny Copperdell,” I said. “For I’ve had not one sensible word out of anybody else in this house—what am I up against?”

  “Three days ago, it began,” she said. “You’d already left Castle Purdy, I reckon.”

  “Started sudden?”

  “A child’s sitting on a windowsill, playing with a pretty and eating a biscuit, happy and fit as a bird,” she told me. “And then in two breaths that child is burning alive with fever, and racked head to foot with misery, and writhing like a birthing woman, fit to break your heart. I’ve never seen anything, not anything, so quick.”

  I touched her forehead, though she pulled away from my hand; it was blazing hot.

  “What kind of sickness is it?” I asked her

  “Well. I wish I knew that!” she said, fretting, and turned her head side to side on the pillows. “Think I’d be lying here like an old fool if I knew that? If I knew even the name, it might could be I’d know what to tell the idiot females in this Castle to do ... what’s its name, that’s half the battle won any time.”

  “And the Magician doesn’t know either”

  I said that under my breath, thinking out loud, and regretted it immediately. A Magician could set bones, and take out sick and useless organs such as an appendix, and deal with cancers. If it had been any of those, the Magician would already have taken care of the matter. And there was no Magician of Rank on Kintucky.

  “I’m sorry, Granny Copperdell,” I said, before she could start on me, “I wasn’t thinking straight; just forget I said it. But you help me ... tell me the symptoms of this stuff. Even the little things that you don’t really think matter.”

  “High fever,” she said, reciting it like a lesson. “Racking pain in every joint and bone and muscle. That’s likely the worst of it, that pain. All the lymph glands swollen and tender, especially in the armpits. A bloody flux, and pain high on the right of the belly. Rash around the ankles and the hands, and a flaming red patch over both cheeks. Sores in the mouth, sores in the privates ... Hurts to breathe, hurts to swallow, hurts to hear any noise much over a whisper—that’s why the windows are shuttered, child.”

  “What have you tried for it?”

  “Everything a Granny knows, and some made up new,” she said. “And none of it any use.” She was in no danger but she was exhausted, and I was wearying her more. “I’m not a good patient for you to be observing,” she said accurately, “I’m hardly touched with it yet, and tough as I am I doubt it’ll get much worse. You go look at the others and you’ll see what it’s like.”

  “Can I get you anything, Granny, before I do that?”

  “You can get on with it, and leave off pestering me!”

  I plumped the pillows up again, and checked to see that the water was easy to her reach, and I went on out and closed the door behind me. She�
��d keep a long while yet.

  Ah, but the others; they were another matter altogether. I counted fifty-one, and they were truly sick. Even Granny Goodweather. She didn’t so much as ask me my name when I leaned over her, and that frightened me.

  They lay in their beds and they twisted, slowly—I can think of no other way to describe it. As if they hung from intolerable bonds. One arm would stretch, the fingers spread like claws, pushing, pushing till I thought the fingerioints would crack, and then the other arm, pushing against some unseen wall. And then the legs, one at a time, stretching till the soles of the bent feet lay flat against the mattress. And no more would the foot reach its terrible extension than it began to move back upon itself ... and then the arms would start. It was like a horrible, endless, solemn, tortured, dance of death; and it was very clear that it hurt them like raw flames. There were women from the town trying to tend them, but I could see that they weren’t accomplishing much. Changing the bedlinens and bathing flesh, bringing them water to drink and soothing the little ones ... that seemed to be it.

  As for treason, the thought was indecent. The Wommacks were so grimly convinced their whole household was cursed that they considered the most absolute neutrality no more than their duty toward their fellows. Even when they were without other troubles to distract them, no Wommack took sides, for fear their bad luck would rub off on the side they’d chosen. With things as they were here right now, 1 could put all else out of my mind and consider only this sickness.

  As it happened, I did know what it was. But I wasn’t that surprised the Grannys hadn’t recognized it, especially since they’d come down with it almost immediately themselves. They’d not really had time to think before their own fever set in, and it was not a common disease.

  I went down the stairs and found the Wommacks still gathered there silently, waiting for me, and I had a strong suspicion looking at them that most—including the Master of this Castle—would be in their beds themselves before the day was out. Considering the number sick upstairs, they’d made a brave showing, and I credited them for that; but not a one that wasn’t white around the mouth, and the red tinge coming up on their cheeks, hectic, and a line of beads of moisture at the edge of the coppery hair to betray them further. All that time out in the sun with me had surely done them no good, and I’d of bet the party food they’d put down lay heavy in their stomachs this minute like Kintucky stone.