The Ozark trilogy

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  Dorothy could be stubborn, too; she ignored Granny Gableframe and put her question. “Sire,” she said doggedly, “you heard what Granny Gableframe just said to Lincoln Parradyne. I would like to know what it meant.”

  The Granny snorted.

  “While he tells you, Your . . . uh . . . Highness,” she said, “while he tells you all the marvelous things the men know that are going to be such a comfort to you, I’ll be getting my Mule saddled and bridled-I’ve earned that much for my services here-and I’ll be on my way. I don’t want ary thing else from this Family, thank you very much-give it away, or burn it, or better still, keep it. When you run out of everything you can divide it up among you.”

  Marygold’s voice was not much more than a whisper, but it was honest. “Granny,” she said, “please don’t you leave us. If I’d of known it would end this way, you leaving us, I never would of gone along with it all.”

  “And if you’d suspected the sun came up in the morning, no doubt you’d of pulled your windowblinds, Marygold of Purdy,” answered the Granny. “What precisely did you expect I would do after this shameful carryon?”

  “Well, the men were sure you’d see it their way after it was all over; even Lincoln Parradyne there, with his back to us all like he’d had nothing to do with it, he was positive you’d be pleased when you saw us be a true Kingdom, the way First Granny wanted it done. . .”

  And Delldon Mallard ran it past her one more time, all about what First Granny had said, and how it had been a Proper Naming, and how now that the Kingdom was taking that road it couldn’t help but prosper. “And so you see, dear Granny Gableframe,” he wound it up finally, “there’s no call for you to be going anywhere, and no call for you to be breaking Marygold’s heart the cruel way you’re doing. Your place is here, with your Liege Lord.”

  Lincoln Parradyne turned around at that; if the Granny burst, which seemed to him likely, he didn’t want to miss it. And he bit his lip to keep his face straight; it wouldn’t do to undermine the Liege Lord’s confidence by laughing at it. It was going to be useful, having a King with no more sense than Delldon Mallard, but it was going to have its embarrassing moments.

  “My place,” said the Granny in a voice of silver needles and icicles, “is at Brightwater. And that’s where I’m going, this minute.”

  The King leaped to his feet and struck the table with his scepter, making all the dishes rattle and dance and splattering coffee far and wide.

  “You’ll do no such thing!” he roared. “It’s treason! I forbid it!” The Granny looked him up and she looked him down, as if she couldn’t believe her eyes or her ears, and Lincoln Parradyne rather expected she couldn’t, when it came right down to it. He wondered when anybody had last forbidden Granny Gableframe, that was Bethany of Brightwater by birth, and a McDaniels by marriage, any least thing she chose to do. Eighty years or more, he supposed; he much doubted her husband had dared cross her, even before she was a Granny.

  She didn’t bother replying to the King’s forbidding; she turned her back and walked right out the door into the hall, down the corridor and out the side doors that led to the stables, and they all heard the braying of the Mules not five minutes later. It seemed to Lincoln Parradyne that it would not be far off to say that the Mules were laughing.

  After she was gone, he found himself facing a solid wall of glares; and a man that had been only one of the Smith brothers yesterday morning but was a Duke Hazeltine Everett of Castle Smith this afternoon stated it for all of them.

  “You told us,” said the Duke, “that the Granny would get over it. You allowed as how she’d be mad-and that’s reasonable-but you never told us she’d leave.”

  The Magician of Rank bowed elegantly. “My apologies, Your Grace. The Granny has proved me mistaken-and given her temper, I’d say we’re well rid of her.”

  “Would you, now?” The Duke did not seem soothed. He nodded toward his wife’s swollen stomach, and asked: “What do you propose for us to do, Lincoln Parradyne, if my Duchess has a girlbaby? Who’s to name her, now the Granny’s gone? I never heard that anybody but the Grannys knew the ways of safe and Proper Naming, and Granny Gableframe was the one and the only Granny in this Kingdom!”

  “I can’t see either Castle Airy or Castle Clark,” said his wife, her hands folded protectively over the shape of the possible girlbaby, “seeing fit to loan us a Granny when my time comes.”

  “Well, I can,” said Lincoln Parradyne. “Charity of Airy would send aid to the Devil himself if she thought he needed it. Put it out of your mind, and should it prove necessary we’ll send to her for help.”

  “I don’t much like being beholden to Airy,” said the King. “They’re Confederationists to the last . . . uh . . . servingmaid, over there.”

  “You like the idea of an Improper Naming any better?” demanded his brother Hazeltine. “You like the idea of a curse such as hangs over Castle Wommack, and I don’t know how many generations since the babe there was Improperly Named?”

  “Allow me to point out,” said the Magician of Rank, “now that you’ve brought it up, that that particular error was made by a Granny. Are you quite sure, all of you, that the rule which says only Grannys can name female children is anything more than a superstition?”

  Too far, too fast. Their shocked gasps and the thud of his Liege Lord’s scepter falling right out of his hand onto the floor told him that.

  “That Granny,” said Dorothy of Smith, “that Granny, she was at her very first Naming, and it’s known she was poorly at the time besides, with a woman in the Castle using illegal Spells against her and not caught until nearly two weeks after it all happened! Everybody knows that!”

  “All the same,” he shot back at her, “the Wommack Curse has lasted over four hundred years. The Granny’s circumstances at the time do not seem to have been taken into consideration by the Powers-which makes very little sense. If even you can see that the Granny ought to have had allowances made for her, it does seem that the Holy One could have mustered up the same amount of wisdom!”

  “Oh, Lincoln Parradyne,” said the Duchess Linden of Lewis, wife of Duke Whitney Crawford Smith and undoubtedly the most capable of the women there-which was saying very little-”you walk a narrow and perilous line!”

  Which he most assuredly did. He was aware of that, and the beads of sweat stood clammy on his forehead. But he’d risked far too much to see it all go sour now for lack of courage to stay on that same dangerous line she referred to; it was the path he’d chosen, and the point of no return had gone by some time ago-he had no intentions of looking back. The biggest problem in this Castle for the next few months, he was willing to wager, would be morale; as the Granny had said, the Smiths were going to be mighty lonely in their pomp. And it was by no means certain that the people of this Kingdom, that for quite a while would find their new rulers as ridiculous as Granny Gableframe had, could be easily controlled. It would not take many crowds of laughing townspeople and farmers to drive the Royal Family to a shaky condition.

  He wanted that, of course; it was his intention that he should rule this Kingdom, and that required a shaky King and a vaporish Queen, and all the rest to match, and the Gates knew he had promising raw material to work with. But they had to be able to at least put up some kind of front.

  “I suggest,” he said quickly, “that we put this out of our minds for now. We’re all tired, and we’ve all been under a strain-and we’ve been cheated of three days’ holiday by the dainty sentiments of the other eleven Families, with, I’m sure, a judicious amount of pressure from Brightwater and the rest of the Confederationists. This is no time to be debating policy, or philosophy, or any other subject. It’s a time for changing our clothes and spending the rest of the day quietly relaxing. Tomorrow we’ll have a great deal of work to do, and we’ll be in no shape for it if we go on squabbling like this among ourselves.”

  “I’m not sure,” said the King, pulling at his beard, “that I feel . . . uh . . . safe without a
Granny in the Castle. There’s always been a Granny here . . . I’ve never heard of a Castle that has no Granny, and I don’t believe I like it. It’s not . . . seemly.”

  “Maybe Granny Gableframe’ll get over her conniption fit and come back,” suggested one of the Duchesses.

  “No she won’t,” snapped Dorothy. “No-she’s made her mind up for good and all.”

  Firmness was necessary here, and confidence; Lincoln Parradyne provided both.

  “I don’t know that I can go along with your concern,” he said casually, “or that I think being without a Granny is necessarily any problem. But I do see that it matters deeply to you, and I think I can set it right. I know of a Granny that has no Castle she calls home.”

  “There’s no such Granny!”

  “There is. Granny Graylady, her name is, and I know where she is to be found. Give me a few hours to rest, and I’ll saddle a Mule and head out to where she’s camped and ask her to join us. No doubt she’d be glad to be settled at last, like all the other Grannys, instead of living all alone. You leave it in my hands; I’ll see to it.”

  They believed it. He could see their faces relaxing. And though he knew perfectly well that no inducement on this planet could have brought Granny Graylady into Castle Smith or any other Castle-she preferred the cabin she lived in in the Wilderness Lands, and the role she filled there-he was equally certain he could find an old lady somewhere in one of the towns who’d be willing to play at grannying for a while if he offered her a large enough sum. All he needed was a female sufficiently old, sufficiently scrawny, and sufficiently venial; anybody could use the formspeech proper to a Granny, seeing as how everybody spent much of their lives listening to it.

  As for himself, he had no reason to believe that a Granny was necessary to the safety of any Castle, or anything else. But he knew the power of superstition. It was power that worked in his favor, day in and day out, and he intended to accord it the proper respect.

  Chapter 11

  “Frankly, Granny Hazelbide, I’m surprised at you,” said Thorn of Guthrie. “A body’d think there was nothing to get done around here that required any attention from that girl . . . you realize what time it is?”

  “I’m not yet addled,” said Granny Hazelbide. “It’s near on one-thirty, by my reckoning.”

  “And mine,” said Ruth of Motley. “Who ever heard of anybody not on their deathbed sleeping till one-thirty in the afternoon?”

  “If you’d happened to drink the brew I sent up to Responsible last night, and had the servingmaid stand over you to be sure you drank it every drop down, you’d still be asleep, too, I guarantee you that.”

  “Oh, you potioned her, did you, Granny?”

  “If I hadn’t of done, she’d of worked all night long last night the way she has the past three. Since when do either of you, or anybody else around here, have to worry about Responsible pulling her weight? The problem’s always been keeping her from working, not getting her to keep at it, as I recall.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Thorn of Guthrie, “it’s a purely disgraceful hour for her to be still in that bed! If you say she’s overworked, I’ll take your word for it, but she could at least get up and sit in a chair. She’s fourteen, Granny, not fifty; she’d make it through the day.”

  “Fifteen,” said the Granny, staring hard at Responsible’s mother. “Fifteen years old on the eleventh of May-which it happens to be, this very day.”

  Ruth of Motley frowned at her daughter-in-law, and exchanged looks with Granny Hazelbide, and then she asked: “Thorn of Guthrie, did you forget that child’s birthday again?”

  “Third year in a row,” observed the Granny.

  “May have done,” snapped Thorn, with a high flush on her cheeks that only rnade her more beautiful.

  “I notice she always remembers yours.”

  “It makes no smallest nevermind to Responsible, and you know it,” Thorn told them both. “Why you nag me about it when she’s got no natural affections whatsoever, I cannot imagine, and I don’t choose to listen to any such trivial clatter on a day like this, thank you very much all the same.”

  “Well,” mused Granny Hazelbide, pursing her lips, “I suppose as a woman reaches your age her memory does begin to suffer a tad, Thorn. No doubt Responsible knows that-and as you say, it won’t worry her a mite. Not a mite!”

  The Missus of Castle Brightwater drew an exasperated breath, and the high flush flared higher still, but she was not about to take bait that obvious.

  “I think,” she declared, “that she should get up. And that’s my last word on the subject.”

  “I’m pleased to hear you say so,” answered the Granny, “seeing as how you’ve already said too many and some left over. You leave the girl alone; the staff’s seeing to clearing up after that mob we had in here, and that’s what we pay ‘em for. No reason Responsible should be doing anything. For sure she’s not missing anything in the way of inspiring conversation.”

  “Since it’s her birthday,” said Ruth of Motley pleasantly, “I’ll side with you, Granny.”

  “You might just as well-because I’m letting nobody near her till she’s slept out, and that’s all there is to it. The load on that child’s back is going to be mighty heavy from here on out, and I’m glad she’s not having to think about it for a little while.”

  Thorn of Guthrie tightened her lips, but she held her peace, and only the speed with which her stylus scribbled at the diary page betrayed her.

  As it happened, Responsible was not asleep. She was awake, and had been since a little past one; but she was not brimming with energy. She felt like she’d been drowned in honey and then had it harden round her-that would be the ebonygrass Granny’d put in the potion. It was rare stuff, and saved in the ordinary run of things for people that’d been through some hellish kind of experience. The little Bridgewraith’s mother and daddy, for example-it would of been appropriate to potion them with ebonygrass, and Responsible hoped somebody had thought to do it.

  She lay there, determined to move, thinking every minute she would move, and only sinking deeper into the languor that held her fast. Her conscience would never have brought her out of it alone; what finally did it, right around four in the afternoon, was the hunger gnawing at her stomach and the leftover taste of the potion. Her mouth put her in mind of the cavecat’s den she’d spent some unanticipated and unpleasant time in back a few months, and that did at last drive her in search of her toothbrush.

  When she’d first waked up, just for a second, she’d thought “Fourth Day of the Jubilee!” . . . Just for a moment she’d forgotten the shambles things were in. It would have been wonderful; just imagine, if things had gone the other way, if the delegates had told the Travellers and the Smiths to take their “free men and sovereign states” hogwash and throw it into the Ocean of Storms. There’d of been a party at Brightwater this night to end all parties; she’d set aside a quantity of strawberry wine, that’s price would of fixed every comset in the Castle, against just such an outcome. Now they’d be able to put it down in the cellars as an investment; not likely it would get any less expensive. Perhaps King Delldon Mallard of Castle Smith would buy it off of Brightwater for his state dinners.

  She spat into her basin, getting rid of the taste of the ebonygrass but not the taste that the thought of the Smiths brought to her mouth. Bitter, it was. And bitterest of all was the thought that nagged at her, that if she’d stayed home till the Jubilee and passed her time at her magic-instead of taking off on that fool Quest all around the Kingdoms-she might well have discovered what the Smiths were intending. She was supposed to find out such things, and make provisions to deal with them, she bore the label for that. But she’d had no slightest inkling.

  Which she rather expected could mean only one thing. The Smiths had been truly, genuinely, wholeheartedly convinced that what they were up to was not wrong. How they’d managed that was a marvel to her, but given the awesome depths of their stupidity, might could be any kind
of nonsense was possible for them.

  They surely had not been backward about turning up in their gaudy array before all the Kingdoms assembled, not any one of them, so far as she could tell. Ignorance, like innocence, was a powerful talisman.

  And then there was the memory, rankling at her day and night, of how she’d sat still for it without a murmur when she’d gotten the letter from Dorothy of Smith saying it wouldn’t be convenient for Responsible to visit Castle Smith on her Quest. It was just that she’d counted on Granny Gableframe to keep things in at least rough order, and the idea of a Magician of Rank actually turning magic against a Granny had never entered her head. It was an unnatural idea, like a Mule playing a fiddle; if it had entered her head no doubt she’d of thrown it right back out again.

  “Things,” she said to her own face in the bathroom mirror, “things are entirely out of hand on this planet!”

  And what was she to do about it? She doubted sleeping all day was a productive way of tackling the problem.

  There were times when she wondered if it wouldn’t have been an easier row to hoe if it’d been runaway technology she had to deal with instead of runaway magic. They’d been so careful about the technology. No robots, not even in the fields and the mines where robots could do the work far more efficiently than human beings ever could hope to. No nuclear anything; she doubted there were more than a score of human beings besides herself who even knew the word. No chemicals in the food or on the soil, no synthetics . . . Without Housekeeping Spells to smooth the heavy wools and linens they wore, the women of Ozark would of spent many hours with their irons. And they’d thought long and hard before they allowed electricity, according to the Teaching Stories, deciding finally that it was a natural thing with its roots in the lightning-and even so, the Travellers wouldn’t use it. Not in their Castle, not in their Kingdom. They’d had to move clear to Tinaseeh to escape its taint, and they’d done it with a grim enthusiasm -and believed that it was magic that powered their comsets.