Ozark Trilogy 2: The Grand Jubilee (18 page)

“I suggest,” he said quickly, “that we put this out of our minds for now. We’re all tired, and we’ve all been under a strain-and we’ve been cheated of three days’ holiday by the dainty sentiments of the other eleven Families, with, I’m sure, a judicious amount of pressure from Brightwater and the rest of the Confederationists. This is no time to be debating policy, or philosophy, or any other subject. It’s a time for changing our clothes and spending the rest of the day quietly relaxing. Tomorrow we’ll have a great deal of work to do, and we’ll be in no shape for it if we go on squabbling like this among ourselves.”

“I’m not sure,” said the King, pulling at his beard, “that I feel . . . uh . . .
safe
without a Granny in the Castle. There’s always been a Granny here . . . I’ve never heard of a Castle that has no Granny, and I don’t believe I like it. It’s not . . . seemly.”

“Maybe Granny Gableframe’ll get over her conniption fit and come back,” suggested one of the Duchesses.

“No she won’t,” snapped Dorothy. “No-she’s made her mind up for good and all.”

Firmness was necessary here, and confidence; Lincoln Parradyne provided both.

“I don’t know that I can go along with your concern,” he said casually, “or that I think being without a Granny is necessarily any problem. But I do see that it matters deeply to you, and I think I can set it right. I know of a Granny that has no Castle she calls home.”

“There’s no such Granny!”

“There is. Granny Graylady, her name is, and I know where she is to be found. Give me a few hours to rest, and I’ll saddle a Mule and head out to where she’s camped and ask her to join us. No doubt she’d be glad to be settled at last, like all the other Grannys, instead of living all alone. You leave it in my hands; I’ll see to it.”

They believed it. He could see their faces relaxing. And though he knew perfectly well that no inducement on this planet could have brought Granny Graylady into Castle Smith or any other Castle-she preferred the cabin she lived in in the Wilderness Lands, and the role she filled there-he was equally certain he could find an old lady somewhere in one of the towns who’d be willing to play at grannying for a while if he offered her a large enough sum. All he needed was a female sufficiently old, sufficiently scrawny, and sufficiently venial;
anybody
could use the formspeech proper to a Granny, seeing as how everybody spent much of their lives listening to it.

As for himself, he had no reason to believe that a Granny was necessary to the safety of any Castle, or anything else. But he knew the power of superstition. It was power that worked in his favor, day in and day out, and he intended to accord it the proper respect.

“Frankly, Granny Hazelbide, I’m surprised at you,” said Thorn of Guthrie. “A body’d think there was nothing to get done around here that required any attention from that girl . . . you realize what time it is?”

“I’m not yet addled,” said Granny Hazelbide. “It’s near on one-thirty, by my reckoning.”

“And
mine,” said Ruth of Motley. “Who ever heard of anybody not on their deathbed sleeping till one-thirty in the afternoon?”

“If you’d happened to drink the brew I sent up to Responsible last night, and had the servingmaid stand over you to be sure you drank it every drop down, you’d still be asleep, too, I guarantee you that.”

“Oh, you potioned her, did you, Granny?”

“If I hadn’t of done, she’d of worked all night long last night the way she has the past three. Since when do either of you, or anybody else around here, have to worry about Responsible pulling her weight? The problem’s always been keeping her
from
working, not getting her to keep at it, as
I
recall.”

“Nevertheless,” said Thorn of Guthrie, “it’s a purely disgraceful hour for her to be still in that bed! If you say she’s overworked, I’ll take your word for it, but she could at least get up and sit in a chair. She’s fourteen, Granny, not fifty; she’d make it through the day.”

“Fifteen,” said the Granny, staring hard at Responsible’s mother. “Fifteen years old on the eleventh of May-which it happens to be, this very day.”

Ruth of Motley frowned at her daughter-in-law, and exchanged looks with Granny Hazelbide, and then she asked: “Thorn of Guthrie, did you forget that child’s birthday again?”

“Third year in a row,” observed the Granny.

“May have done,” snapped Thorn, with a high flush on her cheeks that only rnade her more beautiful.

“I notice she always remembers
yours.”

“It makes no smallest nevermind to Responsible, and you know it,” Thorn told them both. “Why you nag me about it when she’s got no natural affections whatsoever, I cannot imagine, and I don’t choose to listen to any such trivial clatter on a day like this, thank you very much all the same.”

“Well,” mused Granny Hazelbide, pursing her lips, “I suppose as a woman reaches your age her memory does begin to suffer a tad, Thorn. No doubt Responsible knows that-and as you say, it won’t worry her a mite.
Not
a mite!”

The Missus of Castle Brightwater drew an exasperated breath, and the high flush flared higher still, but she was not about to take bait that obvious.

“
I
think,” she declared, “that she should get up. And that’s my last word on the subject.”

“I’m pleased to hear you say so,” answered the Granny, “seeing as how you’ve already said too many and some left over. You leave the girl alone; the staff’s seeing to clearing up after that mob we had in here, and that’s what we pay ‘em for. No reason Responsible should be doing
any
thing. For sure she’s not missing anything in the way of inspiring conversation.”

“Since it’s her birthday,” said Ruth of Motley pleasantly, “I’ll side with you, Granny.”

“You might just as well-because I’m letting nobody near her till she’s slept out, and that’s all there is to it. The load on that child’s back is going to be mighty heavy from here on out, and I’m glad she’s not having to think about it for a little while.”

Thorn of Guthrie tightened her lips, but she held her peace, and only the speed with which her stylus scribbled at the diary page betrayed her.

As it happened, Responsible was not asleep. She was awake, and had been since a little past one; but she was not brimming with energy. She felt like she’d been drowned in honey and then had it harden round her-that would be the ebonygrass Granny’d put in the potion. It was rare stuff, and saved in the ordinary run of things for people that’d been through some hellish kind of experience. The little Bridgewraith’s mother and daddy, for example-it would of been appropriate to potion them with ebonygrass, and Responsible hoped somebody had thought to do it.

She lay there, determined to move, thinking every minute she would move, and only sinking deeper into the languor that held her fast. Her conscience would never have brought her out of it alone; what finally did it, right around four in the afternoon, was the hunger gnawing at her stomach and the leftover taste of the potion. Her mouth put her in mind of the cavecat’s den she’d spent some unanticipated and unpleasant time in back a few months, and that did at last drive her in search of her toothbrush.

When she’d first waked up, just for a second, she’d thought “Fourth Day of the Jubilee!” . . . Just for a moment she’d forgotten the shambles things were in. It would have been wonderful; just imagine, if things had gone the other way, if the delegates had told the Travellers and the Smiths to take their “free men and sovereign states” hogwash and throw it into the Ocean of Storms. There’d of been a party at Brightwater this night to end all parties; she’d set aside a quantity of strawberry wine, that’s price would of fixed every comset in the Castle, against just such an outcome. Now they’d be able to put it down in the cellars as an investment; not likely it would get any less expensive. Perhaps King Delldon Mallard of Castle Smith would buy it off of Brightwater for his state dinners.

She spat into her basin, getting rid of the taste of the ebonygrass but not the taste that the thought of the Smiths brought to her mouth. Bitter, it was. And bitterest of all was the thought that nagged at her, that if she’d stayed home till the Jubilee and passed her time at her magic-instead of taking off on that fool Quest all around the Kingdoms-she might well have discovered what the Smiths were intending. She was
supposed
to find out such things, and make provisions to deal with them, she bore the label for that. But she’d had no slightest inkling.

Which she rather expected could mean only one thing. The Smiths had been truly, genuinely, wholeheartedly convinced that what they were up to was
not wrong. How
they’d managed that was a marvel to her, but given the awesome depths of their stupidity, might could be any kind of nonsense was possible for them.

They surely had not been backward about turning up in their gaudy array before all the Kingdoms assembled, not any one of them, so far as she could tell. Ignorance, like innocence, was a powerful talisman.

And then there was the memory, rankling at her day and night, of how she’d sat still for it without a murmur when she’d gotten the letter from Dorothy of Smith saying it wouldn’t be convenient for Responsible to visit Castle Smith on her Quest. It was just that she’d counted on Granny Gableframe to keep things in at least rough order, and the idea of a Magician of Rank actually turning magic against a Granny had never entered her head. It was an unnatural idea, like a Mule playing a fiddle; if it
had
entered her head no doubt she’d of thrown it right back out again.

“Things,” she said to her own face in the bathroom mirror, “things are entirely
out of hand
on this planet!”

And what was she to do about it? She doubted sleeping all day was a productive way of tackling the problem.

There were times when she wondered if it wouldn’t have been an easier row to hoe if it’d been runaway technology she had to deal with instead of runaway magic. They’d been so careful about the technology. No robots, not even in the fields and the mines where robots could do the work far more efficiently than human beings ever could hope to. No nuclear
any
thing; she doubted there were more than a score of human beings besides herself who even knew the word. No chemicals in the food or on the soil, no synthetics . . . Without Housekeeping Spells to smooth the heavy wools and linens they wore, the women of Ozark would of spent many hours with their irons. And they’d thought long and hard before they allowed electricity, according to the Teaching Stories, deciding finally that it was a natural thing with its roots in the lightning-and even so, the Travellers wouldn’t use it. Not in their Castle, not in their Kingdom. They’d had to move clear to Tinaseeh to escape its taint, and they’d done it with a grim enthusiasm -and believed that it was magic that powered their comsets.

She smiled, remembering the way the Traveller delegation had behaved about the switches that turned things on in Castle Brightwater; she’d seen a mother smack her tadling’s fingers for touching one, like he’d put his hand into goat droppings.

No, they were pure as pure, using the power of sun and wind and water and plain old-fashioned muscle-and magic. Which was where the trouble lay. Magic. Common Sense Level, available to everybody unless they just plain weren’t interested, same as the times tables and the alphabet were. Middle Level, for the ambitious, or those as didn’t care to be overdependent on the Grannys. Granny Magic, for the Grannys only; Hifalutin Magic, for the Magicians. And for the Magicians of Rank, the highest level-the Formalisms & Transformations. Power there and to spare-at least you could turn a robot
off!

She decided she hadn’t the courage to send down for tea at this hour of the day; it was twenty minutes till time for supper. She pulled on a plain blue dress, left her feet bare to irritate her mother, and padded on down the halls and stairways to the kitchen. She could ask for coffee, anyway.

“Evening, Miss Responsible,” said the women when they saw her, and a servingmaid smiled and said she was pleased to see her looking rested.

“Thank you, Shandra of Clark--ladies. Do you suppose I could have a cup of your coffee?”

They settled her at the big kitchen table with a mug of coffee strong enough to make the spoon stand up straight in it, and she began to feel that she might be able to face the Family for supper after all. She’d rather far have stayed in the kitchen, or eaten in the staff’s own diningroom-but that was for tadlings. And she was going on fifteen.

At which point in her musings, the Senior Servingmaid set down a long narrow basket in front of her and said, “For you, Miss Responsible, from all of us, and many happy returns,” and she realized that she’d stopped going on fifteen and gotten there.

“Youall spoil me,” she said, and it was true. They did. For all they had to take from her in the way of scolding about the dust on the furniture and the polish not being high enough on the floors and too much salt in the cornbread-they spoiled her all the same.

“Open it, miss,” said the Castle Housekeeper, that somebody’d just brought in to see the event. “Go on, now.”

The basket was new woven, with a handsome
R
worked right into the lid, and two strong handles, and she’d of been satisfied just to have that for her birthday gift; she looked up at them, surprised.

“Open it!”

She lifted off the lid and looked inside, and saw why the basket had had to be such a big one and needed a braced bottom. Inside was a little dulcimer, like the one she’d lost on her Quest, dropping it right off the Mule’s back into the ocean-only much prettier. It had inlays of shell all along the sounding boards, three hearts and a rose with two leaves to it. Her old one had been just plain wood.