The Ozark trilogy Read online

  “Think you should,” said the Granny, and the other two nodded their agreement.

  “Pheew!” said one of the huddle of girls on the floor below the sill where Caroline-Ann was. “Glad it’s you and not me, Caroline-Ann!”

  “Easy rhymes,” said Granny Flyswift calmly. “Cat. Rib. Bird. Knit. Suchlike. You can manage that, Caroline-Ann; we give you three days, and then we’ll hear it.”

  “Oh, blast!”

  Caroline-Ann sat up straight and dropped her legs over the sill, careful not to kick anybody. “Naturally I had to open my mouth with three Grannys in the room! Botheration!”

  I felt sorry for her; but I needn’t have; it took her only half an hour to do the task set, and we had the song from her right after supper that night. It went like this:

  CAROLINE-ANN’S SONG

  A girl of sixteen as can put up her hair

  in a figure-eight knot, and can do it alone, and can dance through the figure-eights smartly as well— that girl is no child, but a woman full grown!

  That’s what I learned, said the daughter of Brightwater:

  That’s what I learned.

  The smell of a cavecat is ranker than bile, and a cavecat’s attentions are close to its chest, and a cavecat that moves a mysterious mile

  has a second rank odor that’s risky at best!

  That’s what I learned, said the daughter of Brightwater;

  That’s what I learned.

  A rib as is broken will ravage your breath, and the second time round it will ravage your pride, and it’s cold comfort knowing while choking to death that none of the damage shows on the outside!

  That’s what I learned, said the daughter of Brightwater.

  That’s what I learned.

  A cellar of homebrew with corks to be set and a hot spell ahead as makes setting them hard

  keeps a family home from the market and road,

  keeps a family corked to its Hall and its yard!

  That’s what I learned, said the daughter of Brightwater;

  That’s what I learned.

  A Yallerhound’s neither a hound nor a dog,

  it’s a bag full of water with a topcoat of hair;

  it will drown you in slobber for the sake of pure love,

  let the Yallerhound owner think well and beware!

  That’s what I learned, said the daughter of Brightwater;

  That’s what I learned.

  A chair in the moonlight all painted with gold

  is easily taken for royalty’s throne, and a conscience that’s guilty can easily see a scepter and crown in a rock and a bone!

  That’s what I learned, said the daughter of Brightwater;

  That’s what I learned.

  Two little pretty birds sharing one nest,

  hidden away in the littlest tree;

  one has a leash on and sorrows to know it, and envies the other that dares to fly free!

  That’s what I learned, said the daughter of Brightwater;

  That’s what I learned.

  A Granny should cackle and gabble and nag, and twist her tongue round to the formspeech and motions, but garlic still wards if she knows her craft right, and as she adds years she’ll no doubt drop her notions!

  That’s what I learned, said the daughter of Brightwater;

  That’s what I learned.

  A Family as goes through its days set on gloom, talking of curses and harping of fate, eyes to the past and determined to suffer,

  will get what it asks for served up on its plate!

  That’s what I learned, said the daughter of Brightwater,

  That’s what I learned.

  A person whose hands are tied tight at her back, a person who’s bound like a goat to a spit, a person in such a predicament can’t

  neither gather nor sow, neither broider nor knit!

  That’s what I learned, said the daughter of Brightwater;

  That’s what I learned.

  And there was a nice pre-verse to it, too, for times when there might be those singing back and forth:

  What did you learn as you flew out so fine, splendid on Muleback, dressed like a queen?

  What did you learn, daughter of Brightwater?

  Tell us the wonderful things that you’ve seen!

  I could see how, throwing that in every time a verse came round, you could use up a good part of an evening with that song. And I was especially impressed with Caroline-Ann’s solution to the fact that there’s no way anybody can sing my awkward name. It was a fine song, every syllable and note in its proper place, and it added a certain respectability to my Quest, which was why the Grannys had demanded it, of course. I expected to hear a good deal in future of this daughter of Airy.

  I passed two blissful days being mothered by Charity, and teased by her Grannys, and generally catching my breath, and by the end of the third day I felt able to face my role in this world once again. I was grateful to Castle Airy for that, because I had arrived in a sorry condition. And I kept humming Caroline-Ann’s song.

  And then on the third night, I set about catching myself a serpent. Or serpents, as the case might be.

  I waited until all the Castle was sound asleep, and then I took my three baths: one hot, one cold, and one of herbs. I pulled my lawn gown through the small gold ring and saw that it passed without wrinkle or raveling to show for the trip, and I slipped it over my head. I put my black velvet ribbon around my neck, and braided my hair. I set wards and double-wards, which took some time; the guestchamber I was in had three doors and eight windows, and there had to be a pentacle at every one of them, and a double one at the corridor door where the Grannys might pass in their night-prowls.

  It was past midnight before I was finally able to climb up into the center of my bed, set a pentacle round me with white sand from my shammybag, and take what was needful out of my pouch.

  A bowl of clearest crystal, exactly the size of my closed fist, crystal so clear you had to look twice to see it was there. A vial of water from the desert spring on Marktwain that was holy to Skerrys, Gentles, and Ozarkers, and exactly twelve drops of that water poured into the bottom of the tiny bowl- My shammybags—one full of sand, one of fresh herbs, one of dried herbs, one of talismans. My gold chain, and my gold ring. Everything else I needed was inside my head.

  I laid them all out around me within easy reach, and I crossed my legs and sat up straight, and realized that in no way was I tired any longer. Youth does have its compensations.

  Now—we should see what we should see!

  The needed Formalism was an Insertion Transformation; I wanted a name where I had a null term now, and I wanted more than just “Traveller” to fill that null.

  I set down the Structural Index in a double row of herbs, and the Structural Change I laid right underneath it. I set the bowl of desert water in the space of the null term, and I made the double-barred arrow with my hands above the water

  “Let there be,” I said over the whole, “a name, sub-N; and let there be a filling of the null term, sub-T; and let there be no alteration of the underlying structure, sub-S!”

  The whole of it looked correct, but I checked it over one more time, for rigor— and then I closed it off with the symbol #.

  I watched the water closely while it dimmed and clouded and bubbled, and finally cleared again. And then I jumped like a child stuck with a pin!

  I’d expected a Traveller, naturally (and maybe half a dozen more of them, one for every time I repeated the Transformation, since I could change only one term at a time); and I had for sure expected to see a man! Despite the mention that Silverweb of McDaniels was husky enough, if properly clothed, to pass for a man and fly a Rent-a-Mule through a church, I’d been convinced no female was behind any of this.

  But the face that looked up at me from the water; no bigger than my thumbnail but clear in every smallest detail, and certainly clear in its utter terror; belonged to none of the Travellers and to no man ... It was Una of Clark.

 
Una, the silent domestic daughter of Clark, the doting mother of five with the amazingly slim waist ... whose husband was a Traveller. Whose husband wore the Traveller black despite all his years in his father-in-law’s cheerful Castle.

  I never, never would have suspected her. Never! She had seemed to me the dullest woman I’d come across on this planet, up to and including the gawkiest and rawest servingmaid just decided to try her luck in a Castle and still not sure where the doors were. And she had fooled me. Fooled me pure and simple!

  “Una of Clark!” I said over the water; a couple of times, “Una of Clark?” Had it been Sterling looking out at me, I could not of been more astonished.

  Then I tensed—fooling me that well, she might have other skills equally foolsome. If the water began to boil in that crystal bowl again, or cloud over, I wanted to be ready to set a new Transformation on it before she got away from me. But the minutes passed, with only the sound of my heart beating loud in the room, and there was no change—only the tiny, so tiny, shivering figure in the water; and very gradually I had all of her, not just her face.

  You can’t speak, of course, when you’re trapped in blessed springwater by a Transformation, nor can you move. I appeared to have her at my mercy, and I had the rest of the night to decide what to do about that. Which was not so much time; the clock had just struck two.

  I was not precisely free in this; I could go just so far and no farther. Murder’s murder; whether you do it with a hatchet or a Transformation, and it’s not allowed. It would have tidied things up, and I will admit it even crossed my mind, though that shocks me, because I was so put out; but it could not be done. A Deletion Transformation to remove Una of Clark from the matrix of this universe was certainly possible, but it would violate the primary constraint on all magic: it is not allowed, ever, to change the Meaning of things. To do that is the use of magic for evil, and the moral penalties for evil by hatchet are a good deal less severe. They, at least, are administered by people. I’d come within a hair’s breadth of violating that constraint when I tampered with Granny Leeward’s fan, and a very good thing I’d watched the shaping of that nosegay when I lost the rest of my mind; if she’d cared to, she still could of fanned herself with the mushrooms.

  Since my choices were pretty rigorously constrained, it didn’t take me long to select among them. At twenty minutes of three I had finished a bounded Movement Transformation, and I faced Una of Clark, dry now in the night wind and back to her standard size, on a narrow rock ledge at the foot of the cliffs where Castle Airy stood. The waves crashed over the rock where we were, and I motioned her to move back into the small cave I’d noted as I flew in that day.

  “Don’t you come near me!” she screamed at me, and threw up her hands before her face to shield it. “Don’t you dare!”

  “If you drown here, Una of Clark,” I shouted back at her; the wind taking my words and making clattering skeletons out of them, “if you fall into that sea that boils not ten inches from the tip of your dainty white foot, it will be your own fault. And I’ll not be mourning you, you’ll have saved me a great deal of trouble! Get back away from the edge, as I tell you now, and into that cave—move! Get!”

  “I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” she whimpered, hunkering down into the wind. “Oh, I don’t dare move ... I’m so afraid!” Drat the woman; I did not really want her to drown, and it looked as though she might. The stone under our feet was like glass, polished by the constant wind and water, and the wind gusting high, and some of the waves were striking us to our knees and more.

  “Well, you ought to be afraid,” I countered, “you surely ought! That ocean is as near bottomless as makes no difference, woman, and you’re going into it sure if you don’t pull back!”

  I saw her sway as the spray was flung against her ... and fool that she was, she did move—closer to the rim of the ledge.

  Law, I had no time for foolishness; I traced the double-barred arrow in the air and Moved her myself, safe into the narrow shelter cut by the water, and I followed her in just inches ahead of a wave that would have had us both sure, not a second to spare.

  It was dark in there, and I set a glow around her and around me, so that we could see one another. The roar of the waves was under us and all around us, too, it was everywhere, and with each one the whole mountain seemed to shudder under our feet; but we were safe enough there until the tide rose.

  “Witch ... “ she hissed at me ... a serpent she was, right enough ... her teeth chattering, back pressed to the cave wall and her bare feet curled to the curve of the hollowed rock. And she said it once again, a good deal bolder. “Witch!”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “I’m nothing of the kind.”

  “Oh,” she said, “you’re not a witch? Reckon you didn’t snatch me out of my bed and trap me first in some ... some noplace ... where I saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, but your wicked face over me as big as all the sky, and your eyes boring down on me, each of them big as a Castle gate ... and then you brought me here, you SNAPPED me here! Think I don’t know that’s the only way you could drag a decent woman halfway round a continent through the night from her husband’s side?”

  “Oh, stop it,” I said, and sat down on the bare rock in pure disgust. I had been prepared to feel some challenge here, maybe some respect for my opponent, but I was just plain disgusted. She was the one responsible for what had been happening to the milk and the mirrors and the streetsigns, all right—the spring water does not lie, nor do the Transformations fail. But the interference with the flight of the Mules? Just as I’d been too slow to see that when I should of seen it right off, I’d misunderstood it completely when I finally got to it, and gone to an awful lot of unnecessary trouble as a result of my blindness.

  “Here I thought the reason that everything was just barely over the bounds of half-done was cleverness,” I said crossly, wishing I dared smack her face and knowing the thought was shameful. “Here I thought that just making the Mules wobble a tad instead of making them crash was a way of showing your finesse, and a way of hinting at what dread things you might do if you chose to! You realize dial? And all along, all this miserable long time, Una of Clark, it was just that you aren’t very good at what you do! All along, with your piddling little tricks, you’ve been doing the very best you could, haven’t you? Why, we had the whole damned thing clean backwards! Damn!”

  “Well, it worked, didn’t it?” she spat at me, and she had me there.

  And then she hid her face against her shoulder and screamed into the darkness, over and over that same foolish word— “Witch! Witch! Witch!”—until I was nearly distracted. I suppose that was what Gabriel Laddercane Traveller the 34th had used against her; all through the nights of their marriage, lying beside her in their bed, whispering while he stroked her thighs and that slim waist, convincing her to tackle magic far beyond what she was trained in or fit for or had any legal right to even think of. If he’d truly convinced her that she was doing battle against witchcraft when she raised her weak hand against me ... it did not excuse her; but I could see how he might have used that as a levee. Especially with her far gone in the sickness of Romantic Love; it would of served his needs well, and paid him for his long exile from his father’s house, and explained why he’d put up with it over these long years instead of taking her away. The threads that ran to this night were sticky ones, and they clung.

  “Well, now, what am I going to do with you?” I asked her; and myself, out loud. “What am I going to do about you, Una of Clark?”

  I’d lost all taste for harming her; she was only pathetic; but she couldn’t be allowed to go on with her mischief, bungling as it was, all the same. Nor could she be allowed to go back and talk about any of this, and I was by no means sure she had brains enough to see that.

  “Una?” I said sharply. “Una of Clark? You look at me!”

  “No! You’ll turn me into something horrible if I do!”

  Turn her into something horrible? What did she think
she’d done to herself?

  “Look at me, you foolish, silly woman!”

  She lifted her head then, and her eyes were like two huge flat fish in her white face. Most unappealing.

  “Una, what did you think you were trying to do?” I asked her “Maybe if you tell me that I’ll be able to see my way.”

  To my astonishment, she raised her hands beside her face, spread her fingers wide as they would stretch, and recited straight at me—

  ASS.

  BEDPOLE.

  CHAMBERPOT.

  DEAD OF THE NIGHT.

  EGG-ROTTEN BIRD DUNG.

  FISTFULS OF MEALY WORMS.

  NIGHT OF THE DEAD.

  POTCHAMBER.

  POLEBED.

  ASS.

  I was flabbergasted. As nasty a Charm as I’d heard anywhere, and bold as brass about it, terrified as she was. But no elegance. No style! And put together all cockeyed to boot.

  I’d seen six-year-old girls do a sight better than that, and without anything nasty in it to help them along, either.

  I said:

  AIR.

  BALSAM.

  CINNAMON.

  DENY ME NAUGHT.

  EVERMORE WEEPING.

  FOLLOW ME EVERYWHERE.

  EVERMORE SLEEPING.

  DOUBLE MY WORTH.

  CINDERMAN.

  BELLTONGUE.

  AIR.

  “And,” I added, “if you’d like to go on to twelve syllables and back, in twelve sets of rhymed pairs, I’m ready. But do hurry, Una of Clark, because I intend to be in my bed before breakfast.”

  By that time, when she began to sob hopelessly, choking and sputtering, I wasn’t surprised. I wondered what her life was going to be like, from this night on; she wasn’t built for a burden like this, and her husband had chosen a poor instrument to break to his evil.

  “See where foolish love will lead you?” I said to her sorrowfully. “See where it will lead you, woman? Into folly, into shame, into disgrace ... Why didn’t you tell him to do his own dirt? What would your father and mother say of you, Una of Clark, if they only knew what you have done?”