The Ozark trilogy (68 page)

The Mizzurah women fought beside their men, those not required back at home to care for tadlings and babes. “If the men must go, we go also,” they’d said, and the women of Arkansaw, that would have nothing to do with the civil war among their men themselves, had nodded their heads in approval. It was fitting, and they would have done the same, had the situations been the same. They had been much embarrassed when a Purdy female, a tad confused about what was after all a complicated ethical question, took up an ironwood staff and marched off to join her older brother in the Battle of Saints Beard Creek; and it was the women of Castle Parson, happening to be closest, that had gone out and got the tool creature and brought her back to a willow switch across her bare buttocks, for all she was sixteen years of age. If that was what it took to make things clear at Castle Purdy, that was what it took, and they had not scrupled to do it.

Thirty men, two of them Mizzurans, were dug in at a mine entrance near the border of Farson Kingdom under the command of Nicholas Andrew Guthrie the 41
^st
, on this day. Three days they’d been there now, and though water was plentiful it was fouled—that’d be the work of the Purdys, upstream—and the food was gone since the night before.

Their leader stared sullenly into the drizzle, and sat in the slimy packed layers of wet leaves at the mine-mouth, and would not be persuaded to go inside where it was at least dry.

“The sentries have to stay out here,” he pointed out.

“You’re not a sentry.”

“All the same.”

“It’s foolishness,” objected another Guthrie, close kin enough to offer open criticism regardless of rank. “What’ll you gain that way, except pneumonia?”

“Pneumonia,” said Nicholas Andrew Guthrie. “And I welcome it. Rather die that way than most of the other possibilities ... at least it’s an honorable death.”

“Not if you leave your men without a leader by catching it, you blamed pigheaded fool!”

Nicholas Andrew Guthrie didn’t even turn his head.

“What you talk there is the talk of a war that’s real,” he said, and spat to show his disgust. “This is no real war, and I’m no real leader, and youall’re no real soldiers. And you’d be no more leaderless without me than you are while I sit here and court the passing germs, so shut your mouth.”

“That’s inspiring talk,” said his cousin. “Really makes us all feel like throwing ourselves into the heat of battle, let me tell
you
.”

“You want inspiration,” said Nicholas Andrew, “you go home and get some. You’ll get none out here. Here, you’ve got nothing whatsoever to do but wait for a Farson, or might could be some pitiful Purdy, lost as usual, to show up, so you can stick him through the gut with whatever’s handy, or him you. Might could be you’d even have the privilege of doing your gutsticking on a Mizzurah woman, just for the variety of the thing. And everybody can cut one more notch on the timber nearest them to signify the occasion. That inspire you? It doesn’t inspire me, not the least bit.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the constant nameless noise the drizzle made. And then a man spoke from behind them. “How many do you reckon there are left of us?” He had a festering sore on his leg, that would get no better in this damp, and a bandage to his shoulder, and he leaned against the mine wall to keep from falling. “How many, sir?”

My brave and stalwart company,
thought Nicholas Andrew wryly.
My company of walking dead. Flourish of trumpets, roll of drums, off left.
Aloud, he said he didn’t know.

“What with the bad food, and the sickness there’s neither magic nor medicine to treat, and what with the cold, and this bleeding twelvesquare excuse for a war ... there might could be two thousand of us, all told.”

“Two thousand, Nicholas Andrew Guthrie!” The man staggered and clutched at nothing, and somebody moved quickly to grab the shoulder that wasn’t hurt.

“Come on, now,” said the kinsman hastily, “you don’t mean that, and it’s a downright cruel thing to say.”

“Well, I stand by it,” snapped Nicholas Andrew. “And if only a Purdy or a Farson’d come by this place, might could be we’d be able to make that one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.”

There was silence behind him again, and he hoped it would last this time; he had no heart for talking to them. The figure he’d named was a blind guess, but it could not be much more than that. Taking it in round numbers, there’d been ninety thousand of them when this began; fifty thousand Guthries, twenty thousand Farsons, and twenty thousand Purdys. At least sixteen thousand Lewises and Motleys combined, he’d hazard. And what was left would hardly make one good-sized village ... and nothing gained for it, nor nothing
ever
to be gained. Over those centuries when violence was just something in stories and songs around the fire, and an evil something at that, the Ozarkers had forgotten what their native stubbornness would mean if it were put to violent purposes.

It meant nobody would ever yield. It meant nobody would ever give up, ever say, “All
right
, let’s stop before every last one of us is dead in this mess. All
right
—
you
can be the winner, if that’s what it takes to stop this!”

It would never happen. When only two Arkansawyers of different Kingdoms still remained alive on this land, they would be fighting hand to hand—with two rocks, if that was all they had left to fight with, as seemed likely. And it would be a fight to that death. It seemed sometimes that somebody ought to of remembered, when it started, what a war would be like when there could be
no giving up ever
...but nobody had.

The Gentles had no doubt gone deep into the bowels of the earth; not one had been seen since the first day of the fighting. And if they simply waited there long enough, they would have Arkansaw back for their own again, what was left of it, without a single Ozarker to trouble them.

“I think I hear something,” whispered a boy at his side, crawling up close to whisper it in his ear. “Want I should go take a look?”

“You step outside this mine-mouth,” said Nicholas Andrew flatly, and right out loud, “and provided you did indeed hear something, you’ll be picked off before your beautiful blue eyes can blink twice.”

“Oh ... I thought I could get out there, quick-like, and scout around.”

Nicholas Andrew was so weary of explaining what two and two added up to, and explaining it to babes barely out of their diapers ... He drew a long breath, and tried to sound patient.

“Supposing you did hear something, son,” he said, “and supposing it was a human being and one fighting against us. Either he’ll stay where he is, which’ll do us no harm, or he’ll come out into the open where we can pick him off from here—which’ll do us no harm. If he made a noise, you can be sure the idea was to get one of
us
to come out and be picked off. Otherwise, he’d of kept quiet. You follow all that?”

“Yes, sir,” said the boy. “Yes, sir, I do. I expect I’m mighty ignorant.”

“I expect you’re mighty young,” said Nicholas Andrew. “Now get back inside where it’s safer.”

Ignorance. He thought about ignorance. His own military training had been composed of a speech made to a couple dozen like him. They’d all been told that war wasn’t much different from hunting, always excepting what the quarry was, and that they’d been picked for their natural qualities of leadership and their good health, and that they were expected to use their common sense. That had been the sum total of it.

At Castle Guthrie the state of despair was not quite so complete as it was out in the Wilderness Lands or at the other two Castles. Castle Guthrie had been richest to begin with; it was richest still, though its poverty was astonishing. And it had the two hostages, two living symbols that some real action had once been taken—Salem Sheridan Lewis the 43
^rd
, and Halbreth Nicholas Smith the 12
^th
, him as was husband to Diamond of Motley and Master of Motley Castle. Whether he would have stayed on as Master there after the Confederation of Continents was dissolved, or gone back to Smith Kingdom to join his kin, there’d not been time for anybody to find out. Before the issue could be resolved, he’d found himself hostage here; and might could be there were times when he was thankful for the curious chance of it. It would not of been easy for him to choose between his own household—his wife and his children—and his kin. Especially when his kin were known to out-Purdy the Purdys for stupidity.

Around the one fire they had burning in the Castle, the Guthries sat in Council. James John Guthrie the 17
^th
, another threadbare King; Myrrh of Guthrie, his sixth cousin and his queen as well; Michael Stepforth Guthrie the 11
^th
, Magician of Rank (for all that signified these days); three older sons and an odd cousin or two.

They were not discussing the possibility of bringing into this war the cruel and efficient lasers, of which every Arkansaw Family had a plentiful supply, used to shape Tinaseeh ironwood and work Arkansaw mines and quite capable of cutting a man into strips no thicker than a sheet of pliofilm. They were not yet reduced to considering such measures, unlike the Parsons, for they had one hole card left to them still. They were discussing the question of whether a Guthrie ship might be put to use.

“We only have men enough left to send one medium sized ship, maybe a Class C freighter,” Michael Stepforth was saying, “but one is all we ought to need, and a Class C quite big enough. We send it in to Brightwater Landing, we take the Castle, we get ourselves a computer and a comset transmitter and three or four technicians that know how to assemble and run those, grab whatever they tell us we have to have in the way of equipment—and back we come. Why not?”

“You think Brightwater’d let us get away with that?” demanded Myrrh of Guthrie. “It’s a far sight from being what I’d call a
secret
operation.”

“We don’t have any reason to believe Brightwater even knows there
is
war on Arkansaw,” said her husband. He gave the high stone hearth an irritated kick with the toe of his boot, and then did it again for good measure. “For all they know, we’re fat and prosperous over here, living peacefully and respectably, sitting round the tables tossing off strawberry wine and reminiscing about the olden days.”

“Goatflop,” pronounced Granny Stillmeadow. Elegance had never been her strong suit. “I suppose they think snow doesn’t fall here, nor diphtheria touch the babies, nor rivers ever go to flood, nor any
other
such ordinary human catastrophes. I suppose they think we Arkansawyers are immune to all such truck. Goatflop!”

“All right,” said the King, “I’ll grant you that’s not reasonable. I’ll grant you that wasn’t the brightest speech I ever made.”

“That’s mighty becoming of you,” snorted the Granny. “Seeing as how it was beyond question the
stupidest
speech you ever made, and not for lack of other examples to choose from.”

“Granny Stillmeadow,” said the man, “you can granny at me all you like, and no doubt I deserve it. But it still holds that they have no reason, none whatsoever, to be suspicious of one of our ships at their Landing. If they think we’re starving over here, they’ll be just that more likely to think we’ve come to beg for food, and I say
let
them—just so as we get inside the Castle.”

They thought about that a while. It was true, there’d been no communication between the other continents and Arkansaw—it was barely possible that, with the comsets out and the Mules not flying, the war on Arkansaw was as much a secret to the Brightwaters as conditions on Kintucky were to the Families of Arkansaw. It was not something you could test, one way or the other. The war took up so much of
their
minds that there was a sneaking tendency to consider it the major preoccupation of everyone else on Ozark as well ... but that was clearly foolish. Childish. Might could be everybody knew, and what they thought of it would not be anything to pleasure the ear. And might could be nobody knew except the sorry citizens of Mizzurah, that had suffered its effects directly. There was no way of knowing.

And it was true that nobody but Brightwater and Guthrie had had ships of a size adequate for ocean transport, and Guthrie still had its ships; putting one of them to use was something open to them, however much it might strain the last fragments of their supplies and energies.

“Think, Granny Stillmeadow,” said Michael Stepforth Guthrie. “Think what it would mean, if it worked.”

“With computers, and computer technicians to run them, we’d have just enough of an edge,” put in one of the sons. “Just enough to turn things around, Granny.”

Yes. They would be able to offer the remnants of the population of Arkansaw quite a few things, if they had the computers. And
do
to them quite a few things, if they seemed reluctant to accept the benefits offered.

“It’s everything wagered on one throw,” said Granny Stillmeadow, “I remind you of that. We might send a ship once; we might get into the Castle once ... but there’s only the once. And I remind you that even that piddling chance is a matter of pure ignorant luck, no more! We’ve not so much as a Housekeeping Spell to set behind it as a prop-up, don’t you forget that!”

“So? Our luck is not as good as anybody else’s?”

The Granny made a noise like a Mule whuffling, and brought her knitting needles to a full stop, and stared at him in a mixture of contempt and disbelief that had an eloquence words would be hard put to it to match.