The Ozark trilogy (56 page)

How, precisely, did you accomplish a task that could only be done by magic, on behalf of a large population that considered magic to be not only barbarous and primitive but unspeakably evil? How did you go about keeping a promise that had been a lie to begin with, on behalf of a race that so far as anyone had been able to determine was not capable of lying? For she had sworn she’d use no magic, when the complaint was made to her. And no way did she dare call in anyone for advice; as Granny Hazelbide would have said, she had a funny feeling.

She went over and pushed the computer access numbers for POPULATIONS, INDIGENOUS, which produced three entries: SKERRYS, GENTLES, MULES. That always made her nervous, finding the MULES on the list, but the computers were very firm about it. From among the set she chose GENTLES, and requested a full data display. The comset made none of its usual crotchety noises; the reduction of the broadcast area to one small Kingdom had improved its performance enormously. It hummed softly, and gave her what she asked for:

GENTLES, INDIGENOUS POPULATION OF PLANET OZARK-HUMANOID

ESTIMATED NUMBER OF YEARS ON PLANET, FIFTY THOUSAND

ESTIMATED NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS, ELEVEN THOUSAND (CAUTION, THIS FIGURE BASED ON INADEQUATE DATA) LOCATION: CAVES UNDER WILDERNESS LANDS OF CONTINENT ARKANSAW, BOUNDED ON NORTH BY KINGDOM PURDY, ON EAST BY KINGDOM GUTHRIE, ON WEST BY KINGDOM FARSON, ON SOUTH BY OCEAN OF STORMS (NOTE NO EVIDENCE AREA INHABITED BY GENTLES EXTENDS TO OCEAN, DATA INSUFFICIENT)

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: MALES AND FEMALES, APPROX THREE FEET TALL, WHITE FUR ON ALL BODY SURFACES, EYES DARK PURPLE ON YELLOW, FELINE PUPILS PRESUMABLY FOR SEEING IN DARKNESS OF CAVES

PHYSICAL STRENGTH ONE FOURTH HUMAN APPROX (CAUTION, DATA INADEQUATE)

INTELLIGENCE PRESUMED EQUAL TO HUMAN (CAUTION, DATA INADEQUATE)

PSIBILITIE5 UNKNOWN

GOVERNMENT: OLIGARCHY OF THREE ANCIENT FAMILIES

RELIGION UNKNOWN

CUSTOMS UNKNOWN

HISTORY: CEDED ARKANSAW SURFACE TO HUMANS BY TREATY ON SETTLEMENT (CAUTION, REPEAT CAUTION-GENTLES CONSIDER ALL MAGIC SINFUL, HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO SUICIDE FOR “DISHONOR OF MAGIC”-APPROACH WITH CARE)

DATES OF CONTACT: NOVEMBER 112129; APRIL 4 ...

The list went on, showing some sixty-odd contacts in one thousand years-those would be the reported ones, and there’d be twice as many unreported, she didn’t doubt-and then there were a few names with a handful of data attached to each, and the display winked out.

It was a pitiful fragment of knowledge to have about a race you shared a planet with. On the other hand, it was a tribute, after a fashion, to the Ozarkers. They’d made no attempt to investigate the Gentles, as they’d made none to seek out the Skerrys, about whom far less was known. If there was one thing an Ozarker did understand, it was a request for privacy.

Responsible prayed rarely. She had an idea that she ought to pray more often, but she kept forgetting. This, however, was a situation where prayer was indicated forcibly enough to override even her desire not to be beholden. She found herself faced with the fact that if she did not use magic to protect the Gentles they might well be destroyed by the misbehavior of the Families of Arkansaw-not that they’d harm them on purpose, she wasn’t ready to consider any such thing as that, but that in the course of tearing around the continent disputing with one
another
they were almost guaranteed to grow careless of what they tore up and who got discommoded in the process. And if she did use magic, and the Gentles should discover that she had, the whole population might well feel obligated to ritual suicide. Talk of being between a rock and a hard place! She prayed, and she prayed from the heart, and she prayed at length, though she didn’t kneel; the idea that the Holy One had any special admiration for one posture over another, so firmly held to by the Reverends, struck her as ridiculous. The point was the praying, not how your legs were bent, nor how uncomfortable you could manage to get.

When that was done, she sighed, wishing she felt more confident and all charged with divine fire or some such, and not feeling that way at all, and she began taking things from her magic-chest. She drew out the gown of fine lawn and pulled it through the golden ring that fit her little finger; it went through without hindrance or snag, and she slipped it over her head. Her hair went into a single long braid down her back, bound by a clasp handed down from one Responsible to another since First Landing; she was always terrified she’d lose the fool thing and bring on some unspecified catastrophe, but so far she’d hung on to it. Next there were the shammybags that held the holy sands, to be hung from the narrow white belt that went round her waist, and the flagons of sacred springwater, bound together on a cord braided of her own hair and fastened to that same belt. A pouch of gailherb hung round her neck and slipped between her breasts to be warmed. On her bare feet went low boots of Muleskin made soft as velvet; over all, a hooded cloak of the same supple stuff. And she was ready.

She went lightly equipped, by Granny standards. They’d of thrown in two saddlebags of herbs, and put amulets and talismans all over her, and hung strings of garlic and preserved lilac from one end of Sterling to the other; there’d of been feathers and asafetida and probably conjure poppets . . .

Responsible grinned. By Granny standards she was off to a war naked and barefoot and blindfolded. She’d make very sure neither one of them caught sight of her, prowling the Castle in the night as was their habit. The thing was, the less of that truck she had on her person, the less likely she was to be spotted and seen to be engaged in magic if she had the awful fortune to be seen by one of the Gentles. And she’d not have used it anyway; this was a task requiring Formalisms & Transformations, not dolls and herbs and doodads.

As the sun started going down she began to get hungry, but that was to be expected. She ignored her stomach, and watched the line of Troublesome’s mountain out through her window. When the sun was tucked exactly in the notch that marked the highest ridge, it would be time for her to go.

And what, she wondered idly, would Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd have had to say if he’d seen her SNAP from her own windowsill without benefit of a Mule?

Law, there she
was,
thinking of him again! She clicked her tongue like a Granny, disgusted with herself. Sure enough, it had been a kind of peace, a kind of wondrous
rest,
being with someone whose mind she could share as easily as she shared ordinary speech with everybody else. Like moving around in a place of columns and soft wind and- She brought herself up short. If there’d been words for what it was like, it wouldn’t have been what it was; she was just translating perceptions that had no counterpart into perceptions there were names for, and a mighty poor job she was doing of it. Nothing in the dictionary, so far as she knew, would cover an endless space confined in a finite one, nor label for her tongue a corner that you could not go round because it came back upon itself . . . She rubbed absently at the aching place just above her right eyebrow, that spot back of which the Immensity began, a golden Immensity swept by

“Responsible of Brightwater,
stop it! Now!”
she said aloud, sharp as she knew how. A fine shape she’d be in for what lay ahead of her if she went on like this! Think of Una of Clark, rotten to the soul with the sickness of Romantic Love, and how she’d despised her, taunted her, for that! Then think of
her,
Responsible of Brightwater, mooning here at her window over this man she’d lain with twice, and neither time blessed by either Reverend or custom . . . Was she any better than poor Una?

It was just that until he came she had thought there was nobody else like her in all the world. It was a kind of loneliness that was not eased by sharing mindspeech with a Mule, nor what the Magicians of Rank thought passed for mindspeech. And he had eased it, unbraided her mind for her where the knots were tightest and most tangled . . .

Nevertheless, Responsible, there was such a thing as seemliness. She stepped to her window, set one foot on the sill, made certain the picture she held firmly in her mind’s eye was the proper one, so she wouldn’t end up in some Arkansaw goatbarn by mistake-and SNAPPED.

On Kintucky, where it was daytime, the Guardian of Castle Wommack sat at
his
desk, going over again the specifications for his Teaching Order. He was pleased with the habit the Grannys and Gilead had designed; a long gown, high-necked and full of sleeve, hem right to the ground, with no sewn waist. It was caught round by a cord, from which could hang a useful pouch or two with the things a Teacher might need to carry. The cut would be useful; when a Teacher raised her arm to point to a map or a drawing, or just to get the attention of her pupils, the sleeve, narrow at the top and tapering out the rest of its length, would be dramatic. It would form a triangle, with its point below the Teacher’s knees.

Choosing the color had been difficult. The Wommack colors were sea-green and gold, but neither of those had the solemn dramatic quality he was after. Finding a color not taken by any of the other eleven Families, now that the Smiths had added purple to their traditional silver and gold and brown, had seemed impossible. Black was surely dramatic and solemn enough, and the drawings of nuns after which the Grannys had modeled the costume showed that they had been black-but black was the mark of a Traveller. Lewis Motley would not have his Teachers in black. They had settled at last on a shade of blue; not the medium shade worn by the Guthries, nor yet the Lewis azure-but a deep, dark, vibrant blue that was exactly right, and belonged to no one.

The headdress, the wimple and coif that Jewel had dreaded the weight of, the Grannys had modified only a little from the drawings. They had made it one piece and all of the same blue; it showed only the face, coming straight across the forehead just below the hairline, and falling to a point at the waist in back. And round the neck, the only ornament; a medallion with the Wommack crest, on a leather thong.

There was nobody cared to point out to him that the color of the habits was exactly the color of his eyes. And no one of the women would have mentioned to him how the cut of the gown was the same as a woman wore that achieved the rank of Magician; it was, after all, a very different cloth, and it was not subject to the requirement that it be possible to draw it without hindrance through a gold ring that fit the woman’s smallest finger. The women held their peace.

Already the first habit had been sewn up. He had trusted that task only to Gilead, whose fingers were famous for their skill with the needle. A ceremony had been put together-not hastily, either, for he’d done it himself, and he’d weighed every syllable and every gesture-and Jewel had donned the habit and the headdress and dedicated her life forever to the service of the Order. She rode out on Kintucky now, with the Attendants and servingmaid, the Mules walking every inch of the journey so that the people could see them pass by in search of other learned virgins, and she would bring them back to him at Castle Wommack.

The plans for the wing where the Order would be housed were before him, and he meant them to have his full attention. Until a few moments ago they had had it. But now he shook his head in that gesture the Grannys and Jewel noticed more and more often lately, and cursed bitterly, lengthily, obscenely, pounding his fist upon the surface of his desk till the knuckles bled.

Damn
her,
curse
her, oh, the devils all take her and torture her, why could she not have the decency to stay out of his
mind?
Within him, something squirmed, and he was sick with a more than physical nausea; he knew now what the price of a witch’s virginity was, without asking. The question he could not answer was how long it had to go on being paid, and whether he would ever be free again.

He was an Ozarker; violence was something foreign to him. When he used his great physical strength he did it without violence, because it was a force that happened to be needed at that time and place. But so tortured was he now by this woman he had thought to make a pastime of . . . if he could have reached her at that moment, he would have killed her with his two bare hands.

If she could be killed. Could she? He did not know even that, and he laid his forehead on his arms and wept with rage and the despair of utter frustration. He might as well of wished to rid himself of his heart! No-that at least he could have torn from his breast. He did not know where the place that Responsible of Brightwater befouled within him
was.

Responsible stood quietly in the darkness, alert for any sounds that might mean someone had seen her SNAP out of nowhere and would be coming along to demand an explanation.

It wasn’t likely; she stood in a tangle of trees and briars so thick she could not see her hand when she held it up before her eyes, and in her dark cloak and boots she would be invisible unless somebody stood almost within touching distance. Still, this was no time to take chances.

Nothing but nightbirds, used to her now and gone back to their singing, and something making a soft croak in a tiny creek that was running behind her just within hearing. And that was as it should be; there was no honest reason for anybody to be lying out here in the Wilderness Lands of Arkansaw in the middle of the night. The only possibility was a party of hunters-not probable in a tangle like this, it’d make a poor campsite-or the one thing she really feared, a Gentle standing watch. Not that she knew whether they stood watch or not! Ethics, that eternal millstone round her neck; not to interfere, as promised by the treaties, meant not to observe, either; and so she knew almost nothing about the people whose peace and tranquillity she had come to preserve. It was not an ideal situation in which to work, and she considered, briefly, the idea of using a Spell of Invisibility as a means of making certain that the ignorance stayed mutual.