The Ozark trilogy (67 page)

Adam Sheridan Brightwater was wise in the ways of surly men; he denied nothing, made uninterpretable noises when they drew breath and seemed to expect a response, and let them wear themselves out. Only when they were reduced to muttering that if she hadn’t been a woman, by the Holy One, they’d of gone off and left her and her bedamned Mule to tend for themselves did he add anything to the conversation. Seeing as there was no knowing how long they’d be there waiting for her, he thought it might be better to turn their minds from the idea of abandoning her in the Kintucky forests and heading for home.

“What do you suppose she was
looking
at back there all that time?” he threw out, rubbing at his beard. “That has got to be the lookingest woman ever I did see ... and nothing to look at but water, water, and still more water. Thought her eyes would drop right out of her head.”

“I don’t know what it was she was staring after,” Gabriel John answered him promptly, “but I know one thing—it never turned up, and she’s given up on it.”

“
How
do you know that?

“Heard her. This is a mighty small boat, if you hadn’t noticed that already, for keeping secrets on.”

“What’d she say?” demanded Black Michael, and when Gabriel John told them they whistled long and low.

“No woman says that,” declared Haven McDaniels Brightwater.

“She
did
.” Gabriel John was staunch as staunch. “Right in a string, she said it, three broad words such as I never heard before at one time in the mouth of a
man
.
And
I saw her give the gunwales a kick that I doubt did her foot much good. In a right smart temper, she was!”

“We could ask her,” Michael Callaway proposed.

“Ask her? You enjoy being dogbit, Michael Callaway?”

“There’s no dogs on this boat, you damned fool! Mules, but no dogs. Talk sense, why don’t you!”

Black Michael gave him an equally black look and smacked his thigh with the flat of his hand and called
him
a damned fool.

“You ask her a question,” he said, “shell take your head right off at the armpits! Dogbit’s not a patch on it,
I
can tell you. Why, I had the uppity gall to ask her highandmightyness could I help her with a jammed
hatch
, Michael Callaway, and I near lost part of my most valuable anatomy when she flung it back at me ... you’d of thought I’d offered to toss her skirts up and tumble her, tall scrawny gawk that she is, and I meant her only a kindness! Huh! I say leave her alone, as the Grannys directed, and be grateful if she follows suit.
Wo
manbit, that’s what you’ll be otherwise ... or womankicked, or womanstung, or worse!”

Captain Brightwater nodded his agreement with that as a general policy, it being somewhat more than obvious, and the nods went slowly all round.

“Maybe she’ll sight whatever it was on the way back after all,” he said easily. “And maybe that’ll make her pleasanter to be around. We can hope.”

Troublesome, doing her best to keep the branches from whipping Dross into a refusal to go on through the Kintucky Wilderness, was not expecting any such thing. The tail she’d seen again, a time or two, and a flash of purple. Sufficient to prove that the animal was there and as real as she was. But had it meant her to see anything more, had it intended a shared glance, it would have happened by now, and she’d resigned herself to that. She’d not be staring over the water on the trip back, yearning after what she was not to have.

She only hoped they’d
make
it back to Marktwain, Glad as she was that they hadn’t seen their huge companion, those stalwart sailing men, and determined as she was to let slip no careless word now or later, she was astonished. It seemed to her that they might well have trouble even finding Marktwain again, it being no bigger than a continent. What kind of sailors were they, that an animal the size of their boat could swim alongside them from one side of the ocean to the other, and them never even notice it? Come time to land again, she might have to point them out the coast or they’d sail right on past.

“ gusting,” she said to Dross, who said nothing back, but whuffled at her in a way Troublesome was willing to take for confirmation. “Plain disgusting!”

“I say we should use the lasers, and the devil take the treaties.” The King of Parson Kingdom took a look at their faces and shivered in the cold, and he said it over again, louder and clearer, to be sure they’d heard him.

There’d been a day when a statement like that, all naked and unadorned and enough to shock the whiskers off a grown man’s face, would have been cushioned somewhat by the rugs and draperies and furnishings of Castle Parson. No longer. The Castle had been stripped of everything that had any value, and it was nothing now but a great hulk of stone in which every word echoed and bounced from wall to wall and down the bare corridors. Any citizen choosing to look in the windows at the royal Family might do so; no curtains hung there. And the chair where Granny Dover sat pursing her lips at the King’s scandalous talk was the only chair they had left; a rocker for the Granny in residence, and a courtesy to her old bones. As for the rest of them, they sat on the floor and leaned against the wall, or dragged up the rough workbenches that had once been out in the stables and now served for eating meals. When there
were
meals, which was far from always.

“Jordan Sanderleigh Parson the 23
^rd
,” said the Granny grimly—she’d never said “Your Majesty” to him nor ever would— “you’ve been hinting at that, and tippytoeing around that, these last three days now ... but I never thought I’d live to hear you come right out and say it in so many words.”

“And only blind luck that you
have
lived that long,” the man retorted.

“No,” said the old lady. “Many a thing as has changed in these terrible times,
many
a thing. Kings at Farson and Guthrie, ‘stead of Masters of the Castle, as has been since First Landing and is decent and respectable! Three old fools at Castle Purdy calling themselves
Senators
, if you please, and splitting the Kingdom’s governance three ways, when they never could run it even when it wasn’t split and they had tradition to give ‘em a clue what to do every now and again!”

“Granny, don’t start,” begged the King, but she paid him no mind whatsoever.

“But the day’s not come yet,” she went on. “when an Ozarker—always excepting the filthy Magicians of Rank, that, praise be, have had their teeth pulled anyway—when an
O
zarker would raise a hand to harm a Granny. I’ll be here a while yet, if we do live on weeds and bad fish. I’ll be here a while.”

Marycharlotte of Wommack, huddled against the draft in a corner more or less sheltered from the wind, challenged her husband and drew her shawl tighter round her shoulders.

“We gave our word,” she flung at him, “as did Castles Guthrie and Purdy! We aren’t degraded enough, living worse than animals in a cave—at least they have fur enough to keep them warm, or sense enough to sleep the winter out—we aren’t degraded
enough
? Eating thin soup three times a day, made like the Granny says out of weeds and roots and one bad fish to a kettleful, and the Twelve Gates only knows what people not at the Castle must be living on! That’s not enough for you yet? All the animals slaughtered, all the children and the old people sick, and the young ones fast joining them, that won’t satisfy you men? Must we be liars and traitors as well,
before you’ve had enough?
”

Jordan Sanderleigh Farson turned his back on his Queen and spoke to the wall before him, down which a skinny trickle of water ran day and night from the damp and the fog.

“We cannot go on like this,” he said dully.

“There’s a choice?”

“We cannot go on fighting a war,” answered the King, “grown men from a time when ships can travel from star to star and computers can send messages over countless thousands of miles ... fighting a war with sticks, and boulders, and knives, and a handful of rifles meant for hunting or taken out of display cases at the museums. You should
see
it out there, you two ... you’re so smug, you should go take a long look. It’s a giant foolery, entirely suitable for the comedy at a lowquality fair in a Purdy back county. Except that people are not laughing, you know. People are dying.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted,” said Marycharlotte. “People dying.”

“You made it right plain that was what you wanted, all you men,” Granny Dover backed her up. “No question.”

The man leaned against the wall, whether it was despair or exhaustion or both they did not know, and shouted at the two of them.

“We never had any intention that it was to drag on and on and
on
like this!” he roared. “A week or two, we thought, maybe a month or two at worst and a few hundred dead, and then it would be
over!
This isn’t what we meant to have happen ... oh, the Holy One help me in a bitter hour, it was never what was intended, never!”

The two women, the one near a hundred years old and the other in the full bloom of her years, but both little more than bones wrapped in frayed rags, they kept their silence. He looked to them for the smooth moves to comfort that he expected, the reassurance that of course it wasn’t his fault and he had done all he could and more than most would of been able to; and none of that was forthcoming. They didn’t
say
to stop his whining ... but he heard it nonetheless. Jordan Sanderleigh, raised on the constant soothing words and hands of Ozark women, felt utterly abandoned. This was indeed a new day, and a new time altogether, when the women of his own household looked at him like they would a benastied three-year-old.

“Jordan Sanderleigh,” said the Granny, and she measured her words out one by one and hammered them in with the tip of her cane, “when this war began, a Solemn Council was held. All the Families of Arkansaw, there assembled. And it was agreed that we were
O
zarkers, not barbarians such as we left on Old Earth because we despised them worse than vermin! And it was agreed that in the name of decency,
to
which we still lay claim, I hope, no Arkansawyer would use a laser against another or against another’s holdings. Signed it was, and sealed. And we’ll not be the ones as goes back on it.”

The man flung himself down on the nearest window ledge and closed his eyes. He remembered the occasion well. Himself, King of Farson; James John the 17
^th
, King of Guthrie; the three Purdy Senators ... the Granny was right that they were fools, all they could do was squabble among themselves, but they’d had dignity that day, the Purdy crest on their shoulders and their staffs of office in their hands. And the women, all absent to show their disapproval, but willing when it was over to admit that if there had to be a war it was a considerable improvement over the ancient kind for them to meet before it and set up its conditions. He had not been ashamed that day, and he had not been poor; he had been eager to get at the war, to settle once and for all the question of who should be first on Arkansaw, to be done with it and take up their lives once again. And he had been more than willing to sign that treaty banning the lasers ... it was civilized.

“We all die, then,” he said aloud. “Slowly. Like fools and lunatics.”

The Granny hesitated not one second. “So be it,” she said.

“Ah, you women are hard,” mourned the man.

“Ah, you men are fools. And lunatics.” Marycharlotte of Wommack mocked him, matching her tones exactly to his. And he said nothing more.

Out in the ravaged Wilderness Lands of Arkansaw the struggle went on, as it had for near twelve months now. First there had been the preliminary squabbling, as each of the Castles moved to lay out that
it
should rule over all on Arkansaw henceforth, and be first among the three Kingdoms, and had thought to do that with words and threats and strutting about. There’d been no idiot behavior such as had disgraced Castle Smith, no purple velvet and ermine and jeweled scepters and Dukes and Duchesses—a King and a Queen, dressed as they’d always dressed, that had sufficed. But it had never occurred to either Farson or Guthrie that the two other Castles would argue about their obvious and predestined supremacy on the continent.

And then when it became obvious to everybody that neither Farson nor Guthrie would ever accept the other, and that Castle Purdy would never do more than wait to see which was the winner so that it could join that side, there had been the period of drawing back to the Castles to decide what was to be done. There had been the shameful ravaging of the tiny continent of Mizzurah off Arkansaw’s western coast, both the Kingdoms of Lewis and of Motley, so that that land which had been the greenest and fairest of all Ozark now looked like the aftertime of a series of plagues and visitations of the wrath of some demented god. Not that Mizzurah had wanted any part in the feuds of Arkansaw, but that Arkansaw had been desperate for even Mizzurah’s pitiful resources.

And then the war had broken out—with the dignified meeting first, of course, to lay down the rules—and it dragged on still. Civil war.

When the citizens of Mizzurah had been ordered to join in the fighting on Arkansaw, they had made it more than clear that no amount of harassment would bring them to any such pass, so that it had been necessary for the Arkansawyers to take the Masters of Castles Motley and Lewis and hold them hostage at Castle Guthrie as surety against their people’s obedience.

And now the men of Mizzurah fought alongside the men of Arkansaw, divided up three ways among the three Castles as was fair and proper, since it was that or see the hostages hung, or worse; but they spoke not one word, and they never would. In silence, they drew their knives, that had been intended for the merciful killing of herdbeasts, and used them on other Ozarkers as they were commanded, excepting always the delicate care they used to be sure they raised no hand against another Mizzuran. In the same silence they dropped great boulders from Arkansaw’s cliffs down on columns of climbing men, and threw staffs of Tinaseeh ironwood to pin men against those cliffs for a death not one of them would have inflicted on
any
animal. The officers had the few rifles, and no Mizzuran was an officer, which meant they had no shooting to do, and that was probably just as well. The Lewises were without question the best shots on Ozark, having always fancied the sport of shooting at targets, and keeping it up over the centuries when most of the Families had let the skill fall away into disuse.