The Ozark trilogy

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  She knew the words of the speech by heart, every one of them the perfect word. All about the solemnness of this occasion. Commemorating that great day five hundred years ago when after much struggle the Twelve Families had set aside their fears of anything remotely resembling a central government and allowed the Confederation of Continents to be formed. Commemorating the slow but steady progress as they moved from meeting one week in the year, a token foot in the waters, toward the present one month in four. A couple dozen sentences about the wickedness and corruption of Old Earth that had driven them away and into space, and the mirroring sentences that congratulated the Confederation for letting none of those varieties of wickedness arise here on Ozark. She rang the changes and pushed the buttons, and she could of done it all in her sleep, so far as the words went.

  But the manner of saying those words-the modulation of her voice and the phrasing, the set of her features and the positions of her body-that was a very different matter. That demanded considerable fine-tuning, a constant eye on the men she faced, an adjustment for a frown here, a careful pacing of a phrase for a wandering expression there; it took her mind off both her uncle and Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd.

  If it hadn’t been for that, she’d of been delighted to let Donald Patrick read the words; and if it hadn’t been for that, and the fact that her mother knew full well she hadn’t the skill to control this roomful of males, Thorn of Guthrie would of insisted on her right to read them and backed Donald Patrick in every objection he raised. Thorn had no reluctance for the limelight.

  A thousand years had gone by here on Ozark, and who knew how many billions before that on Earth; and still men spoke solemnly of the power of logic, the force of facts and figures, and remained convinced that you persuaded others and won their allegiance by the words you said. It would of been funny if it hadn’t been such pathetic ignorance, and there were times when Responsible wondered whether the males of other inhabited worlds suffered from the same ancient illusion.

  It would for sure have been helpful if she could of known whether the members of the Out-Cabal shared the same faith in the power of the surface structure of language. In fact, it would of helped to know whether those three beings were males of their species, just for starters.

  She put that thought out of her head instantly; it was distraction, and a sure certain way to lose her audience and run into objections to her plans for this day.

  In the balcony the Grannys noted appreciatively the skill with which Responsible wooed her unruly crowd, and Granny Hazelbide felt she was justified in her pride at having brought the girl up. She stood up there, bald as brass before the restless males, and she played them as easily as a person that lived by fishing would play a little stippleperch in a creek. It looked easy when she did it, and Responsible looked cool and easy herself in her elegant gown of dark green with a pale green piping round its hem and collar. But Granny Hazelbide had held the girl’s head all the night before while she’d first vomited everything she’d eaten and drunk at the Banquet and the Dance-which wasn’t much-and then retched miserably on an empty stomach and cursed the weakness of her body. Not more than an hour’s sleep all told had she had, Granny Hazelbide was certain of it, but none of that showed now. Not a tremble of her hands, brown hands that showed the hard work they did, against the creamy paper. Not a slightest hesitation of that voice, though her throat must of been raw. Smooth as satin, bold as brass, cool as springwater, that was her girl.

  It wasn’t working on the Brightwater men, naturally; they were used to Responsible and took her about as seriously as they did the servingmaids. And the Travellers were fighting it, staring up at the ceiling to break the hold of it upon them. Granny Hazelbide sincerely hoped they’d hear from their women later about their illbred behavior. But it was working on everybody else, they were just this side of trance, and the final paragraph would finish them off. Not a one had protested as Responsible read off the list of events that would fill Opening Day, and the comset screen on the front wall behind her spelled out the lengthy agenda in small bright lights.

  There was to be a Memorial Address by the Reverend Terrence Patrick Lewis the 5th, head of the church of this Kingdom. There was a Commemoration Ceremony. There were three separate Awards Ceremonies for service to the Confederation, and at each of those there’d be awards speeches and acceptance speeches and folderols. There was a noon banquet, with two guest speakers. There was a reading of the Articles of the Confederation, with a commentary to follow from the senior Magician of Rank pointing out the satisfying parallels between the structure of the Articles and the notations of Formalisms & Transformations. When Responsible got through, there were not five unscheduled minutes available from the end of her welcoming speech to the Closing Prayer that would-so the lights recorded-be pronounced at six o’clock precisely that afternoon, just in time for supper. And Granny Hazelbide could tell by the backs of their necks and the set of their shoulders that the Traveller men were silently lamenting the loss of time before they could get on with what they’d be seeing as the real business of this Jubilee, and that the restraint was unsettling their stomachs. She wished she could of hoped they’d empty those stomachs as Responsible had hers, but it wasn’t likely. No doubt the Travellers had to answer some calls of nature, but the idea that one of them might be so human as to vomit went beyond the bounds of imagination. That would, after all, be waste.

  She felt the eyes of Granny Leeward on her then, her that was a Traveller born and bred, as Responsible had reminded her, and she didn’t like it. The woman was uncanny, and she held some trump card-that much had been clear from the way Responsible went white when her name was mentioned, as well as from the arrogance of her behavior. She’d all but shoved the other Grannys aside taking the central place in the balcony row this morning, and she hadn’t scrupled to do it without so much as a beg-your-pardon, either. Some trump card. Something that Granny Hazelbide had no clue to, but that came near unsettling her stomach.

  Wickedness in a Granny was unthinkable; they were human like any other human, and they could make mistakes, but in everything moral they were above reproach. And it therefore made no sense that she should suspect Leeward of evil intent . . . but something there nagged at her.

  Responsible had matters well in hand and needed no attention. She had turned the meeting over to her pettish uncle with casual ease and gone out into the hall to climb the stairs to the balcony. The men were still half stupored from the word patterns flowing over and around them, a situation Donald Patrick would no doubt put an end to in short order. He couldn’t talk for beans, never had been able to. But it was his meeting now, and Granny Hazelbide could afford to give her mind over fully to the problem of Granny Leeward, where logic did apply.

  No Granny could do deliberate evil, that was a given. It would turn inward and destroy her if she tried. She would sicken, and the evil would show plain in her eyes and in her flesh. Not Granny Leeward; the woman was rail-thin and had a nose like a fishhook, but she had the radiant bloom of health. It followed then, followed as the night the day (and praise be that had never failed yet), that Granny Leeward planned no wicked act toward Responsible of Brightwater or anybody else. She could not.

  And yet, wherever Granny Leeward moved, the other Grannys pulled away from her, drew back their stiff skirts. The woman that sat at her right hand now, Granny Golightly of Castle Clark, was not overfastidious. She was famous for her mischief, and for a certain cavalier disregard of the consequences of that mischief. Still she was edged to the right in her seat in a way that crowded her next neighbor and could not be comfortable, but preserved her from any chance of touching Leeward-it kept a full two inches of space between them. That provided the second given: it was not just herself, Granny Hazelbide of Brightwater Castle, as looked at Leeward and saw darkness puddling round her skirt-hems; it was all the Grannys.

  And that provided the third. Twenty-seven Grannys could not be wrong. She might be overly suspicious herself, because s
he had raised Responsible of Brightwater and knew the Travellers had set themselves to bring down the Confederation the girl was sworn to maintain. One or two others might have a hidden soft spot for Responsible, those as had known her well years ago, a child visiting the Castles of near kin. But every one of them, even those that scarcely knew the daughter of Brightwater, was pulling back from Granny Leeward like she was a source of polluted water. That many Grannys, all turning against one of their own-that had never happened before. Not ever. Generations ago, when the poor soul at Castle Wommack had nearly brought the whole system crashing down around their heads by giving a Wommack girlbaby an Improper Name, and the Twelve Gates knew there was cause and aplenty for resentment, no Granny had turned on the foolish one. And Granny Leeward had done nothing yet this day but sit there and watch the proceedings, knitting sedately on an unidentifiable strip of dark-gray work-probably underwear for the young girls of Traveller, scratchy to subdue the natural passions the Travellers feared inflamed them all-knitting and watching. And breathing. She’d done nothing more.

  Granny Hazelbide saw Responsible come in at the side door and motioned to her to come take her seat; she’d had enough and then some, and she meant to head for home. It was all very well leaving matters to Responsible and mouthing platitudes about lying in beds once they were made, but she loved that child. She had a few tea leaves to brew, and a few Charms and Spells to try, and furthermore she intended to set strong wards in Responsible’s bedroom, where she slept not twenty feet away from Granny Leeward’s bed. And might could be she’d take a nap; she wasn’t as young as she had been.

  Responsible accepted the seat gratefully, however much it might annoy her uncle to look up and see her there among the Grannys instead of in the back row as he would consider fitting for her age and station. She was worn completely out; if there was a reserve of energy left in her someplace, she didn’t know its location and hoped she wouldn’t find herself obliged to seek it.

  Here she could keep an eye on her uncle, and an eye on the delegations, and her presence would make it plain to Granny Leeward that she wasn’t afraid of her. She was afraid of Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd, but she was safe from him up here, and she intended to surround herself with respectable females of all ages and degrees until she was back in her room with her door barred against all untoward possibilities that might involve him.

  There’d been a good deal of sympathy for the sister, young Jewel of Wommack, when the Attendants had brought the gossip back from the Landing. Two Grannys telling that child she had to keep her brother in order, more shame to them, and if they thought it was good for Jewel’s character she hoped they both came down with pimples on their nosepoints. It wasn’t fair to the girl, especially since she would surely believe them, and torture herself through the whole Jubilee-instead of enjoying herself as she ought to of been allowed to do-following that wicked young man around and worrying about how to see that he did no harm.

  Personally, Responsible had no intention whatsoever of turning her safety from Wommack over to his sister. Jewel was beautiful, and it was said that she was astonishingly learned, and she had the awkward elegance that meant the beauty would be the lasting kind. But Responsible had looked her full in the eyes at last night’s Dance, going down a Reel, and what she’d seen had been the clear innocent eyes of a child. A wise child, but a child all the same. Responsible of Brightwater was prepared to love the girlshe was irresistible-but she would take care of herself her self.

  And she’d speak to the two Grannys. They’d no right to spoil the girl’s entire holiday with their rearing practices-the Gates only knew when she’d get another one, stuck there on Kintucky. Let them bring her up properly when they had her home again at Castle Wommack; that struck Responsible as quite soon enough.

  Chapter 3

  She could not move, not even to shake one skinny finger at him; she couldn’t talk except when it pleased him to permit her that privilege, which was rarely. But short of actually putting her into pseudocoma, there was no way that Lincoln Parradyne Smith the 39th could dull the red rage that glowed in the eyes of Granny Gableframe, and he didn’t consider the coma justified by the situation. In fact, he found himself admiring the amount of hate the old lady managed to express without word or motion. There was an ancient saying-”If looks could kill . . .”-and it surely applied here. He’d seen some looks in his time, but this one was spectacular, even for a Granny.

  “You might just as well stop glaring at me like that, my dear Granny Gableframe,” he’d told her. From the very beginning. “I’m not impressed,” he’d said, “not in any way, not to any degree. You may glare at me all day and all night-all you are going to get from it is a headache.” It hadn’t discouraged her any.

  Lincoln Parradyne didn’t mind, though he didn’t look forward to the moment when he would have to turn her loose and put up with her tongue-lashing.

  “How long can you keep her like that?”

  Lincoln Parradyne glanced at the man that stood beside him, wondering if he could be serious, and sure enough he appeared to be, and so he shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows and said, “Till she dies, if I like.”

  “Well, I don’t want her dying,” objected Delldon Mallard Smith the 2nd, “whether you like or not!” And all three of his brothers, standing round the Granny’s bed, indicated that they strongly agreed with that sentiment.

  The Magician of Rank asked himself, from time to time, which one of the four Smith brothers was the stupidest. Delldon Mallardthe 2nd was the biggest; Whitney Crawford the 14th was the handsomest; Leroy Fortnight the 23rd was the fattest; and it appeared that the most cowardly of the set was Hazeltine Everett the 11th. But for stupidity, it was hard to choose among them, and the fact that they were his blood kin was a heavy burden to him.

  “You hear me, now?” demanded Delldon Mallard. “I want no misunderstanding. That’s our Granny and we love her, and if it just happens that she can’t quite be brought to go along with what’s needful without a certain amount of pressure being applied, all right; but she’s just an old lady and she’s frail, and I don’t want-”

  Lincoln Parradyne was completely out of patience. The man would ramble on for half an hour if he wasn’t stopped, and all of it nonsense.

  “I don’t want to hear what you don’t want,” he said tiredly. “I have no interest in what you don’t want! Your requirements were quite clearly specified, Delldon Mallard-you wanted Granny Gableframe in a state where she could not interfere with your plans, and I’ve provided you that. If she were one of the servingmaids, I could also have seen to it that her condition wasn’t marred by . . . irritation. But this is a Granny, cousin, not a dithering girlchild.”

  Leroy Fortnight snorted from the foot of the bed, where he was alternately kicking the bedpost with his boot and punching it with his fist.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, snickering. “Isn’t your magic good enough to keep her down? One little old scrawny woman?”

  “I don’t believe I’d talk to Lincoln Parradyne like that,” hazarded one of the others. “Not unless you fancy him laying you out the same way as the Granny. You think you’d like that, Leroy Fortnight?”

  Delldon Mallard cleared his throat. “That,” he said firmly, “would . . . uh . . . be illegal. Illegal.”

  “Do you suppose,” marveled the Magician of Rank, staring at the big man with true astonishment, “that what I’ve done to Granny Gableframe isn’t illegal?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Well? Well?”

  “I don’t really think so,” said Delldon Mallard. He was the oldest, and Master of this Castle; he felt a sense of responsibility and wanted his position made unambiguous. “I don’t really think that legality enters in here, you know. I . . . uh . . . gave the matter a good deal of thought before I asked the Magician of Rank to do this. And I’m satisfied in my own mind that what this represents is a kind of . . . uh . . . contest. That is, if the Magician of Rank was to perform a
Transformation like this and paralyze just any old lady, say, just any old lady at all, why, that would . . . uh . . . be a different kind of thing. That would be illegal, I’d be obliged to agree. But not with the Granny here . . . She, uh, has her own magic, and as I said-”

  “Sit down!” said the Magician of Rank. “Delldon Mallard Smith the Second-shut up and sit down.”

  “Now I don’t see that there’s any call for you to speak to me like that,” began Delldon Mallard. And then he saw Lincoln Parradyne set one hand on the bedstead and stretch out the other toward him, and he sat down instantly and closed his mouth.

  “I believe,” said Lincoln Parradyne through clenched teeth, “that I had better explain this to you gentlemen just one more time before we leave for Castle Brightwater. You do not appear to me to have it straight in your minds. Not at all.”

  “Now, Linc-”

  “Be still!” thundered the Magician of Rank. “You listen to what I say, you listen with both ears for once! Do I have your attention?”