The Ozark trilogy

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd was waiting for her, sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up and his arms clasped around them, leaning back comfortably with his head against the wall beside her bedroom door.

  “Oh, law,” she said, “wherever did you come from?”

  “Afternoon, Responsible of Brightwater. Same place you didthat repository of hot wind and tiny minds we choose to call Confederation Hall.”

  She ignored that, and said, “Good afternoon, Lewis Motley Wommack, and you’ll miss your supper if you don’t hurry. The delegates are intended for the first serving in the Great Hall . . . you want to end up eating with the children?”

  He cocked his head and raised his eyebrows at her, and looked her up and down, and she took one step backward before she caught herself.

  “You ran away from me once,” he said solemnly.

  “So I did.”

  “You plan to repeat that?”

  “If I do, you’ll no doubt notice,” she snapped.

  He smiled and leaned his head back. again and closed his eyes; it was clear he’d no intention of moving from her door. She could, of course, have. had him, removed-or removed him herself, if the commotion either would cause had seemed justified. It would of been an interesting problem of manners if it had not concerned her quite so personally.

  It is called a Time Corner, Granny Hazelbide had said, holding her tight between knees so bony they hurt her even then, in front of all the other five-year-olds, and we cannot see around it. Could she run away from a Time Comer twice?

  And then there was the question of what, precisely, he knew. He had glanced at her when she sat exhausted on a bench in his Castle hall, and for sure, just as the Prophecy had said, he had known her and she had known him, in same way that she could not account for. But had some Tutor told him, years ago, that the day would come when there’d be hard times for the entire population of Ozark on account of his behavior with Responsible of Brightwater, and hers with him? No matter what she did, said the Prophecy, there’d be hard times-but nowhere did it say there was a way of escaping. It might could be that he sat there now, insolent by her door as if he’d been near kin, because he too had been told that what lay before them was not to be avoided, and he wanted to get it over with and put it behind him. And it might could be he knew nothing at all, that no gossip from those little girls had found its way to Castle Wommack over those eight years, and that he sat there for reasons he understood not at a11.

  “Lewis Motley Wommack,” she said, watching him closely, “why are you here on my doorsill?”

  “To see Responsible of Brightwater,” he answered, perfectly easy. “I’ve come for audience.”

  “Audiences,” she said carefully, “are held with queens and kings. We’ve no such nonsense here, young Wommack.”

  He opened his eyes then and looked at her, and Responsible turned her own eyes swiftly away and stared at the floorboards of the corridor, that were polished and gleaming for the Jubilee till she could see a dim reflection of herself staring back at her. She was in no hurry to look at him directly; one look into those eyes of his and the world had swung away from beneath her, once before. In the seconds it had lasted she had fallen endlessly, before she had managed to break free and run.

  “You are a kind of royalty,” he said, and she could feel his smile like sunlight on her flesh. “I don’t know what kind, nor does anybody else-but I mean to find out.”

  “You talk rubbish,” she said.

  “And you tell lies-and we’re even. Look at me, Responsible of Brightwater, her that travels round the Castles on Solemn Quest, with boots of scarlet leather and whip and spurs of silver . . . her that can command a Magician of Rank as easily as I command an Attendant-oh, yes, my fine young lady, we do hear these things, and the servingmaids will talk, for all you caution them . . . Look at me!”

  Because she had the feeling that escape, if escape there might be, or perhaps the mercy of delay, lay specifically in not looking, she shook her head like a stubborn child ordered to recite, and stared unrelenting at the floor. And that was her undoing. You can’t keep a wary eye on a serpent unless you watch him, and his hands were gripping her shoulders before she knew he’d moved.

  “I tell you,” he said in a voice that held the promise of endless patience, “look at me! Am I so ugly as all that? So terrible I’ll turn your face to stone?”

  She struggled in his hands and turned her head away, and with no trouble at all he used one of those hands to hold her fast and the other to tilt her face up. She could feel the warmth radiating from him where he stood, not half an inch between her body and his, and she put all her strength into pulling away from him, with her eyes tight shut.

  “Responsible of Brightvvater,” he scoffed, “I expect you were not Properly Named. Poor little girlbaby, your Granny clabbered the thing. Timorous of Brightwater, that’s more like it. Cowardice of Brightwater, might could be. My little sister has more courage than you.”

  That bothered her not at all. She’d been hearing nonsense intended to provoke her to foolishness all her life, and except for that single mistake with Granny Leeward, none of it had succeeded in a very long time. What she’d heard from all around her lately made his taunting no more than prattle. But his physical strength was a different matter. There was no legal way she could break loose from his grip, short of screaming for help like a terrified child--and nothing would of brought her to such a shameful pass.

  There was no help for it. And once her mind was settled to that, she wasted no more time. She opened her eyes and looked at him.

  No one would have called him handsome, but he was wondrously beautiful. His head was thick with curls of coppery Wommack hair, copper with lights and fire in it, and she knew from the look of his wrists and throat that naked he would gleam in the light with that copper everywhere. He had the beauty gnarled trees and rough cliff faces have, with no elegance to him anywhere -except for his eyes. They were blue, like any Wommack eyes, but a blue so dark that it put her in mind of the violets that grew deep in Brightwater’s forests in the last days of March and were so useful for simple Spells. The eyes had great elegance, and an utter authority, and they were as dangerous as she had remembered; she looked full into them, mustering her courage, and once again the floor dropped from beneath her feet and she was helpless.

  “Come into my room,” she said to him, in a voice she had no mastery of and hardly recognized, suspended in endless blue. It was, she decided, like being trapped in glass-blue stained glass. She had a sudden image of herself in a pointed church window, marked off all around with a leading of black, and perhaps a Mule beside her and a squawker above her head, and cleared her throat quickly. Laughter would not be appropriate, however much it might tempt her.

  “You’re not afraid for your reputation?”

  “I have no reputation,” she told him. And that was so. Everything had been said of her, and much of it was true. “Are you afraid for yours? Or have you forgotten how doors work?”

  He rubbed at his nose with the hand that wasn’t occupied in holding her, but he made no move to touch her door.

  “It’s warded,” he said.

  Responsible gathered together enough of her attention to sniff the air, and to set aside the smell of him that flooded her senses, and was amazed that she’d not noticed the garlic sooner. Granny Hazelbide had been by here, and would no doubt have hung garlic wreaths round Responsible’s neck if she’d dared.

  “My doors,” she told him, “are always warded, one way or another, and always will be. Make up your mind, Lewis Motley Wommack--you have waited all. this time here at my door, and played a foolish child’s game of Look Into My Eyes with me, and now I am going through that door. Do you follow me or not?” And she added, “Mind, I’m not running from you. You’re free to keep me company.”

  Once they were inside he sat in the rocker by her window that Granny Hazelbide had chosen the night before, and she took another and pulled it over faci
ng him.

  “Well,” she asked, “you suffer any ill effects from the wards?” He looked himself over, and he took his time about it, and then he allowed that there seemed to be no change.

  “I haven’t been turned into any kind of varmint, there’s that,” he said. “Nor struck dead, nor my wits scrambled. There’s that.”

  “Did you expect such stuff?” she marveled. “Wards are to keep evil out, not create it! What kind of Tutor did you have, there at Castle Wommack, that he didn’t teach you even that?”

  “You are highly valued, daughter of Brightwater,” he answered, “though it’s not considered polite to mention it. Very highly valued indeed. I’ve heard that song”-he sang the chorus in a pleasant enough voice that would one day be deep--

  “What did you learn as you flew out so fine,

  Splendid on Muleback, dressed like a queen?

  What did you learn, daughter of Brightwater?

  Tell us the wonderful things that you’ve seen!”

  “All the way to Kintucky,” she said, wondering, “all that way, you’ve heard Caroline-Ann of Airy’s song?”

  He ducked his head, mock-humble. “Even in the Kintucky outback,” he said, “we have comsets. I know all the verses-shall I prove that?”

  “Mercy, don’t! I’d feel a fool for sure, sitting in my own room and hearing you sing a song about me.”

  “Well, then,” he said, “because you are so highly valued, I’d thought it might be harder to find myself alone with you. I was prepared for . . . oh, at least a Granny in a fury, to bar my way.”

  “And so she would, if she knew you were here,” said Responsible.

  “And what will she do when she finds me here?”

  Responsible shook her head in amazement. “Young Wommack,” she said, “you are downright ignorant, not to mention insulting. Even here, `in the Brightwater outback,’ we know to knock on doors. Even Grannys don’t enter rooms without leavewhy should she find you here? I don’t intend to give her leave.”

  He stood up at that, drew closed the curtains at all three of her windows, and went and stretched himself full length on her bed. She liked the look of him against her white counterpane, and she told him so.

  He didn’t pause to acknowledge the compliment.

  “You learned many things, touring the Castles, having adventures,” he said. “Now come learn something useful.”

  She was still thinking she would do no such thing when she lay down beside him. Her counterpane was turned down, and her clothes and his lay in a jumble on her rug, and the thought still lingered. Only when she noted that she had been right, that the copper hair covered him in all but two or three specific places, did she abandon that idea and concede that she was indeed about to learn something.

  “I am not ready for this,” she announced.

  And there are times when the land is not ready for the rain, but it falls all the same.

  He ran his fingertips over her thighs, and set his lips to her nipples, and he was not overly careful how much of his weight she had to bear.

  “I dislike that,” she said clearly.

  “This, too?”

  “I dislike that even more.”

  “You lie,” he said.

  She surely did. Everything his body had promised, shirted and trousered and cloaked, it delivered in abundance. Her loins arched toward his touch and she knew most clearly the meaning of longing. She was all out of patience, the aching of her body for him was unbearable, and if she had known any manner of hurrying him she would not have scrupled to use it. Unfortunately, she was operating this time from a position of total ignorance, and she could only grit her teeth till she shuddered, and wait.

  “You’re an anxious creature,” he said finally, and he lifted her onto the gold of his belly and set her gently where she might ease her own need. It was not what she had expected at all, and certainly not what her experience in the stables and goatbarns had led her to expect, and she moaned in desperate frustration.

  “It’s impossible,” She said. “It can’t be done this way!”

  “Lady; lady,” he answered her, “I promised to teach you something useful, For sure it can be done this way, if you will onlythere!”

  Nothing she had heard or read or imagined had prepared her for what it was like to have the full thrust of his maleness within her, and she forgot everything in her determination to draw from him every last measure of the ecstasy offered.

  “You see?” h¢ said roughly.

  She did, most certainly she did, and when he would have held her away from him she, cried out fiercely and slapped at him, frantic in her determination to achieve something-her body knew what it was, though her mind did not-and he laughed and let her have her way for a while.

  Until she hovered just on the edge of that achievement. And then, ignoring her teeth and her hands, he held her still in torment against him.

  “Oh, dear heaven, dear heaven,” she moaned, “let me loose!”

  “Shhhhh. . . hush. . .”

  “No! I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it another second . . .”

  She fell against him, broken in despair, sobbing and past all pride, and he made a soft noise of satisfaction, gripped her in those sure hands, and held her while the shudders racked her, more and more swift, and her breath tore at her throat, and then he said:

  “Now, Responsible of Brightwater. Now I shall show you the most useful thing of all.”

  And he grasped her hips and moved her, and suddenly she knew that she would die of joy, and he muffled her screams against his shoulders and let her take of him everything that she wanted. It took a very long time, and not once did he make a sound.

  She had heard women speak, married women and women of experience, of what happened after the act of love. Some men, it seemed, would talk to you. Others would fall asleep. Some would demand food; among the Traveller males, she had heard it said, there were those that would drop to their knees and give thanks for the blessings just received.

  This man, however, was doing none of those things. He had raised himself on one elbow and was staring at her as if he had never seen anything like her before anywhere. Responsible had no illusions about her beauty, she had Thorn of Guthrie to compare herself with every day of her life; it could not be that which put such an expression on his face. And she was reasonably sure that the look he bore was not the usual afterlove expression.

  “What,” he demanded harshly, “was that? What the Twelve Bleeding Gates happened?”

  Responsible reminded him that she had been the virgin here, not him, which made that a foolish question. “There are a number of words to choose from,” she added, “always depending on your degree of delicacy. Pick the one you like the best.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” And then, “You didn’t notice anything unusual?”

  Responsible made an exasperated noise and climbed over him abruptly, heading for her bath. The bed was a sea-marsh, and she was not much better.

  “Young man,” she said over her shoulder, “I have never lain with a man before you. If there was something unusual, I wouldn’t know it. What do I have to compare with you?”

  He followed her into the bathroom and joined her in the hot water, still frowning, and the frown lasted until they both were clean and once again clothed, and sitting in the two rockers as sedately as if nothing but conversation had ever passed between them.

  “I must have imagined it,” he stated.

  “No. I am convinced that it truly did happen. I was there, Lewis Motley.”

  “Responsible of Brightwater, do you remember what you said to me, just at the last?”

  It hardly seemed proper, but then nothing they’d done in the past hour had been proper. She thought for a moment, and then answered him to the best of her recollection.

  “I said . . . `My lovely one, it is so wonderful to be inside you.’ “

  He cleared his throat, and directed her to think about that. “Doesn’t it seem to you,” h
e asked, “that the anatomy is just a tad scrambled?”

  She thought about it, and saw what he meant.

  “Isn’t it always like that?” she asked. “After all, it’s mighty close contact.”

  “Not that close,” he said. “No. It is not always like that. In fact, it is not ever like that.”

  She set her lips, and found that she was no longer afraid of his eyes.

  “It was like that,” she declared. “I was there, and so were you, and for certain sure it was precisely like that. And if you didn’t want it to be like that, you should have provided a lecture as you went along.”

  He was going to be a very stubborn man, she thought, immovable as a mountain; a natural force like a tide or a storm, against which you could break into a thousand pieces, and he would never notice. And she thought, somewhat more than a little belatedly, of the Time Corner Prophecy. There was a lot in there about what would happen if she “stood before him.” She doubted that what she’d done could be so described.

  “Law,” she whispered, more to herself than to him, “I wonder what will happen now?”

  He swore, and stood up to stand with his back to her, staring out of her window, holding back one curtain with his hand.

  In honest bewilderment she asked him, “Why are you angry?”

  “I’m not angry,” he said, but he didn’t turn around, and she knew that now he lied.

  “Lewis Motley Wommack,” she said, “go eat with the children. They’ll be serving them now.”

  He left her without another word, and she sat there rocking until the last light was gone from her room and she rocked in full darkness. She wasn’t sorry for what she had done; nothing that pleasant could be a thing to regret. And her fear of him was gone for good and all. But the consequences of what she had done, now there was something to ponder on. For one thing, she was vulnerable to a number of unpleasant things that her virginity had protected her from until now. The Magicians of Rank would not need to be half so constrained in their constant wearing away at her, now that she lacked her maidenhead, and the first to take a look at her tomorrow would know that. As would the Grannys, one and all. But the Prophecy had been most specific: whatever it was that she would loose upon this world, she and Jewel of Wommack’s brother, the harm would not come from knowledge shared by their bodies. That was laid out unmistakably.