The Ozark trilogy (52 page)

“Well? Is there more?”

That was the son-in-law again, and Lewis Motley gave him a long considering look, what was called a “withering glance” in that Castle, and much feared. Sophia caught her lower lip between her teeth, and moved closer to her husband, that’d made so bold as to challenge the heir.

“I’m still on the riddles,” he said coldly. “When I’ve finished, I’ll say so. That suit you?”

“It suits me.”

“Consider our situation, then: say you don’t worry, as my brother did, about lack of political order. I’m willing to grant that’s not an issue likely to grip everybody’s mind as it did his, and does mine. But we are the
Wommacks,
I remind you. We are alone, fourteen thousand-odd of us, in the middle of a wilderness barely cut back from its original state, surrounded by a great ocean known for its storms. And to comfort us? We have the Wommack Curse.”

“Lewis Motley--”

“No more comsets to provide us easy company, tie us tight to the other eleven Families at a push of a button. No more freighters pulling in to our dock with the latest gewgaws from the cities. Not likely we’ll have visitors flying in my Mule, anxious to see the beauties of our wilderness and our inhospitable coasts. We are going to be
alone
now, in a way that no Ozarker has ever been alone before. That, now, I reckon you can understand, whether you’re interested in politics or not. And it’s that that’s got to be dealt with.”

He looked at them all, long and hard, and rubbed at his beard with both hands, fiercely, like it tormented him.

“As for me being Master of this Castle,” he went on, “that’s a piece of foolishness, and brings me to the end of the riddles and the beginning of business. I told you I’d let you know-what I am about to say is the urgent business of this day.”

“Now, Lewis Motley?” demanded Granny Goodweather. “You think that’s fitting?”

“Now,” said the young man. “Right now.”

“Then I’ll have the tadlings sent out of here, and the staff told to feed them and cosset them and put them to bed. This is no place for children.”

“Fair enough, Granny Goodweather,” he told her, “fair enough. I’ve no special desire to bore them, and nothing to say that would interest them. But anybody that’s reached the age of twelve stays-that’s no child. Not any longer, if ever they were. Jewel of Wommack, you’ll stay. And you, Thomas Lincoln. And while you’re sending the rest out, Granny, I’ll say my say.

“I understand,” he said, “all the fire and brimstone you Grannys are putting out about not crossing Jacob Donahue, and it strikes me very odd, seeing as how you never scrupled to cross him ten times a day and twice that on Sundys while he lived. But I’m not afraid of either one of you-let us have that straight and no question in your minds about it-and I’ll
not
be Master of Castle Wommack. Master! The very thought turns me sick.” He saw the Grannys’ mouths open and he shouted at them, “Hear me out!”

“Very well,” said Granny Copperdell, and Granny Goodweather nodded. “But what you say had best be carefully thought out aforehand, young man. Custom is, the Master of the Castle names the heir; you plan to go against that, you lay your reasons out mighty plain.”

“This is no time,” said Lewis Motley grimly, “for the people of Kintucky to be asked to accept me as Castle Master. Nineteen
years old, known-as my brother pointed out-to be wild; and far less willing than he thinks to be any less so. That may be romantic, but it’s not good sense. I’ll have no part of it. But I’ll compromise, for the sake of your sacred damned customs, and not to scandalize the countryside further, and because I care for the Wommack name. I’ll not be Master; but I’ll be Guardian.”

“Explain yourself!”

“Granny, if you’d leave oft interrupting me, I might be able to do that.”

“Get on with it, then.”

“The proper heir, and proper Master, sits there beside youThomas Lincoln Wommack the Ninth, my brother’s elder son. He’s his daddy all over again, and he’ll make a fine Master; he just needs a little time. I propose to give him that time. I’ll be Guardian for this Castle, and him at my side to learn what there is to do -precious little that is, by the way, in case you females think I haven’t noticed. I’ll do the tasks left to the Master, and do them with my whole heart and my whole strength-until the day Thomas Lincoln reaches an age and skill suitable to let him take it on, and
that
day, ah, that day, I shall be free of this particular set of fetters my dear brother saw fit to leave me.”

“Shame on you,” said Gilead. “Him not cold yet, and you speaking of him that way! You’re a hardhearted man, Lewis Motley Wommack, and not a natural one. He was your brother, and he stood as father to you, as best as ever he could!”

“That does not oblige me to be grateful, Gilead, when he hands on to me a task he tells us he couldn’t face his own self, and not only am I not grateful, I resent it. You hear me? I resent being
used,
and I resent years of my life being taken from me, and nothing but my loyalty to this Family keeps me from handing this over to Chandler over there, that’s just chafing at the bit to have the job! Or Jareth Andrew Lewis, hiding behind Sophia, that’s already challenged me twice!”

Granny Goodweather raised her finger beside her temple for silence, and waited till she had it, and then she spoke straight to Thomas Lincoln.

“You understand, boy, what your uncle is saying?” she asked him. “You agree to it? It’s your right to object, and your right to
insist
on Lewis Motley following your daddy’s wishes right to the smallest letter. And though he claims he’s not afraid of a Granny or two, I give you my word on it we have ways of making him take
that
back in a hurry! What’s your feeling on this, Thomas Lincoln?”

The boy threw his head up and gave her a casual look that was so like Jacob Donahue it made Gilead catch her breath.

“I think it shows good sense,” said Thomas Lincoln, “and I stand behind it. And if it’ll make Lewis Motley feel any better, there won’t be many years taken from him, as he puts it-the sooner the better, to my mind.”

The Granny sighed, satisfied. “That’s settled, then” And she pushed her chair back, and smoothed her skirts, ready to leave the room and be about her business.

“Please sit yourself down, Granny Goodweather,” said Lewis Motley, “I’m not through yet. There’s just one more thing. We have ahead of us a long time of hardship and lack and terrible loneliness. And through that time, our people will need something to rally round, something to look to as a stable center. The Travellers have their faith to carry
them;
we have nothing but our Curse, and it makes a poor companion. Delldon Mallard Smith’s an idiot, and the day will come he’ll wish he’d never heard the word `King,’ but he has one thing worth copying. What we need, all alone out here, is magnificence. Pomp and circumstance. Ritual and pageantry. And lots of it. And as it happens, we have a perfect excuse for it.”

“Whatever in the world?” demanded Granny Copperdell. “Whatever in this wide world?”

“We have the problem, now there’s no comset, of educating the children on this continent. No more sitting them down every morning to learn what the computers served up from Brightwater; and the Grannys and the Tutors can’t be expected to take them on more than a year or two past the seven years old they are when they finish with them now. They don’t have the time, nor the training. And we have Jewel of Wommack.”

He rubbed his hands together, and nodded politely at his sister, who was staring at him, feeling a chill in her bones. Whatever it was he had in mind, she could be sure certain it meant another burden for her.

“We’ll have a Teaching Order,” said Lewis Motley with satisfaction. “And Jewel will head it-whether she fancies it or not! She knows chemistry, she knows physics, she knows biology, she knows music theory, she knows painting, she knows history, she knows linguistics-what don’t you know, my much-indulged little sister? Always at the comsets, and Jacob Donahue so proud of your learning, saying you were to be let alone and somebody else could peel the vegetables . . . The day’s come to redeem that favor, Jewel! We’ll need a suitable
habit
for you, something splendid and yet dignified, something that will draw attention and inspire respect; and we’ll send you with two Senior Attendants and a servingmaid for escort, all round the towns, to find and bring back here other young females with qualifications like yours. We’ll house all of you in the north wing of this Castle-not a room of it’s in use, except for one library, and that fits neatly-and you will be Senior Teacher. Teacher Jewel, we’ll call you, and we’ll send the other Teachers you train out over this scratched patch of living for people to be in awe of. One in every town, to be their own bit of pomp and majesty. Gilead, you’re clever with the needle-you’ll help me gown her properly.”

“Not today!” Gilead cried. “Not today, nor tomorrow!”

“No-but the day after. And you, Jewel, close your mouth. You have the skill, you have the knowledge, you have the beauty, you’ll have the elegance once we’ve garbed you; and most important of all, you have the will. You can command, and you’re not afraid to. You’ll do it beautifully, sister mine! You hear me?”

Jewel of Wommack had planned on a husband and half a dozen babes for herself, to add to the ones already making the halls noisy at the Castle. She’d planned on a suite of rooms nobody else had seemed to care for, a corner suite with a window looking out into a tangle of huge old trees, where a tadling could step right from the windowseat onto a treelimb and back again. Three girls and three boys, she’d planned on, all raised loyal to the Confederation, fallen or not.

She set that aside, now. As she’d set aside the idea of being a child, when her parents had drowned, and taken up her post as the woman that’d have to do for her brother.

“I hear you, Lewis Motley,” she said.

She had some idea what a habit would be like. There’d been little room on The Ship for pictures of such stuff, but there were a few in the library her brother had mentioned, and she felt the weight of the wimple on her forehead already. And that brought a thought.

“I’ll not cut my hair,” she announced to nobody in particular. “You put that out of your mind.”

“Is that where your learning is?” asked Lewis Motley. “In your hair?”

The Grannys clucked their tongues, and Goodweather spoke up.

“Too much has happened for one day,” she said, “and all of us are in a sorry state. You there, making jokes at a time like this; and Gilead, about to faint on us. I believe you have the right of it, young Wommack, with your Teaching Order, I do believe that is exactly what we need, and I can see it down the way-it’ll be a thing that comes to matter. But for now, enough. Enough and a right smart piece left over. This meeting’s closed.”

And then she thought of one more thing. “Lewis Motley?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I’ll be expecting you in my room shortly, about that earache.”

“Granny,” said Jewel, “that’s a waste of your time. I’ve been trying to send him to you about that for days now, and he takes my head off every time I mention it. He’s
got
no earache, you care to listen to him, nor no headache either. You can tell him all you like how many times you’ve seen him, wincing like somebody stuck him with a pin again, rubbing at his head and scowling-it won’t do you a scrap of good.”

“Lewis Motley!” objected the Granny. “You’ve got your work cut out for you for a good time to come, and no quarter anywhere. This is no time to be distracted with a misery, you need to be the very best you can be! You come and see me and let me-”

He cut her off with a sudden chop of both hands in the air.

“Like you said, Granny,” he told them, looking right through them all and biting the words off one by one, “this meeting’s closed.”

At Castle Smith the sovereign was fretful, despite the fact that that very morning the new Granny’d flown in behind his Magician of Rank on his Mule and taken up residence in the Castle. She looked mean enough, and she talked the formspeech in a way that was a consolation to ears long used to hearing it, and having her there filled a hole that’d been gnawing at him. But he was not happy. He sat on the throne set up for him in the Castle Ballroom, now known as the Throne Room, and fidgeted, while his Queen watched him distractedly.

“She can’t do it,” said King Delldon Mallard Smith the 2nd. “I don’t be
lieve
she can do it!”

“She’s done it,” answered Lincoln Parradyne.

“She’s got no
right!”

“On the contrary, Your Majesty-she has every right. Or, to be more accurate, Brightwater Kingdom has every right.”

“There has
always
been the comset network on Ozark, Lincoln Parradyne. From the very . . . uh . . . first. The comsets supply our news. They carry our messages. They provide our education and our entertainment. They are everything that on Old Earth had to be done by a mail service, and a telephone service, and a television service, and a radio service, and a-”

“Your Majesty,” interrupted the Magician of Rank, “I am familiar with the history of Earth. And I assure you that the comsets have done far more than all the services and media of that misbegotten planet combined. We will be greatly inconvenienced without them.”

“Then-”

“But,
Your Highness, Responsible of Brightwater is as much within her rights to restrict the range of the comsets to the Kingdom of Brightwater as she would be to keep its buildings there, or its Mule herds there, or anything else that belongs to it. Brightwater provided the comset service to the Confederation, not to the Kingdoms-and the Confederation is no more.”