The Ozark trilogy

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  And so the number of lashes had been set at twice twelve. A memorable number. Eustace Laddercane remembered only one other unfortunate to earn so high a number as that, and that time it had been for stealing food from the common stores and gorging on it. And that time the Whip had fallen on the broad back of a man full grown.

  The Long Whip whistled through the air—stroke seventeen. The Magicians of Rank put themselves to the trouble of calling out the number each time for the watchers, that they might not lose track and think that surely it had to be almost over.

  At his side he felt a long shudder take his wife’s body, and he dared a quick look, sure it was the birth pains, but she knew his thought as soon as he did, and without turning her head she murmured to him not to take foolish chances, that she was all right. All right, she said, but for the whipping—

  Avalon of Wommack did not scream again after the nineteenth stroke, but Granny Leeward took care not to leave the people wondering what was the point of laying five more strokes on a body already dead.

  “Praise be,” said the Granny solemnly. “The household of this youngun can go tranquil to its beds this night. Avalon of Wommack has paid in full the debt of her wickedness, and she stands now in eternal bliss, smiling and singing at the right hand of the Holy One Almighty. Praise be!”

  The Magicians of Rank raised their long shears as one man and cut the loops that held the Whipping Cloth to the hooks, and there was nothing then to see but a pile of bloody linen, very nearly flat, upon the stained ground.

  Somebody’s child, walking the edge of hysteria, screamed out over and over: “Where did Avalon of Wommack go? Where is she?” And there was the ringing smack of a full blow across that child’s face as its mother moved desperately to offer up a penalty before the College of Deacons could prescribe one.

  And Granny Leeward’s voice rose strong and sure—and why not, seeing as how she was little more than sixty and mighty young for a Granny—leading them in the hymn that had been chosen to end this particular whipping. It was seemly; its title was “Divine Pain, Willingly Endured.” Except that Avalon of Wommack had not been willing.

  The members of the College of Deacons moved along the walkway, their arms folded gravely over their chests, watching and listening for any sign of somebody singing with anything less than righteous enthusiasm. It was, after all, an occasion for celebration, what with Avalon of Wommack’s eternal bliss and her family’s tranquility and all; and the College of Deacons was fully prepared to see to it that a suitable explanation was provided for anybody present that couldn’t understand that on their own.

  The little ones sang their hearts out, and the older ones sighed and released their grips upon the small heads just a mite. The children knew already; sing, sing loud, and sing joyful. Make a joyful noise ... they knew. Or there’d be a smaller version of the Long Whip waiting at home, and the mother assigned a specific number of strokes to be laid on, by the Deacon that’d spotted the wavering voice. It made for hearty music.

  Eustace Laddercane Traveller the 7th believed, really believed, in the Holy One Almighty. And there had not been a whipping yet that he had not raised his own voice in the closing hymn, almost roaring out the words, waiting for the divine wrath to reach the limit of Its endurance and strike Granny Leeward dead before his eyes. It had not happened yet, but his faith that it would was a rock on which he stood, and a comfort to him in the nights when often he dreamed it was a child of his loins that cringed and screamed and twisted under the strokes of the Whip.

  “It went well, to my mind,” said Nathan Overholt Traveller the 101st. “No faintings, no foolishness, and no punishments to pass out afterward—all very satisfactory.”

  The other three nodded, and agreed that it had gone well enough.

  “Well enough, perhaps.” That was Feebus Timothy Traveller the 6th, youngest of the Magicians of Rank on Tinaseeh. “But the child ought not to have died.”

  The two Fanon brothers, Sheridan Pike the 28th and Luke Nathaniel the 19th, looked at each other. There were times when they wondered about Feebus Timothy, finding him a tad soft, wondering if there wasn’t a slight taint of Airy blood there somewhere to account for what came near at times to romantic notions. Times when they felt he’d profit from a stroke or two of the Long Whip himself. He sorely needed toughening up.

  “There is no room on Tinaseeh for a disobedient child,” said Nathan Overholt harshly. “The subject is closed.”

  “There was a time,” persisted Feebus Timothy, “when we could have saved her, any one of us, no matter how many lashes she had taken.”

  “There was a time,” said Sheridan Pike reasonably, “when we could cause the Mules to fly and carry us on their backs, and a time when the winds and the rains and the tides obeyed us. And that was that time, and it is gone. We deal now with this time.”

  The mention of the powers they had lost silenced them all. It was not something you got used to. Once you had been someone whose fingers could make a casual move or two and a cancer would shrivel and disappear inside the sick one’s body, leaving no trace behind. Once you had been someone that could SNAP through space, moving from the Wilderness Lands of Tinaseeh, across the vastness of the Oceans of Remembrances and of Storms, to land less than a second later in the courtyard of any of the twelve Castles of the planet Ozark. Once you had been someone who saw to it that the rain fell only when and where it was needed, and that the harvests were always bountiful, and that the snow fell only deep enough and often enough to be an amusement for the children and a change for their elders ... once.

  Now, on the other hand, it was as Sheridan Pike had said. Now they had to deal with this time. Four Magicians of Rank, their titles as hollow as their stomachs and their gaunt faces, garbed in a black grown shiny with wear, and their only power now the power of fear. It was a painful comedown, for they had been truly mighty.

  Luke Nathaniel Farson had been picking idly at his front teeth with his thumbnail, a maddening little noise in the silence; and then he stopped, just before they could demand for him to, and asked: “Do you suppose it’s true, that rumor about the Yallerhounds?”

  “Luke Nathaniel!” Even Feebus Timothy got in on the outrage.

  “I don’t know,” mused the other man. “They’re hungry. We’re hungry, here at the Castle ... think of the people in the town. A Yallerhound, or a giant cavecat, that’s a sizable quantity of meat. And though it’s true I can’t think of any of the men with strength enough left to take a cavecat, you know as well as I do that a boy of three could catch a Yallerhound. All you have to do is call the creature, and it will come to you.”

  “Nobody,” said Sheridan Pike, “nobody at all, would eat a Yallerhound. They would starve first.”

  “They will, then,” said Luke Nathaniel. “Those that haven’t already.”

  “Change the subject,” ordered Sheridan Pike flatly. “Can’t any of you think of something that’s not intolerable to talk about? You’ve lost your magic powers, but I wasn’t aware that you’d lost your minds as well.”

  “Well,” said Feebus Timothy, “we could discuss today’s scheduled urgent and significant meeting. That’s not intolerable, just useless, and silly, and stupid.”

  “Your sarcasm is very little help, Cousin,” said Sheridan Pike.

  “All right, then, I’ll ask seriously. What is on today’s agenda?”

  “A discussion of the situation.”

  “Again?” Feebus Timothy was serious now, serious and flabbergasted. “Whatever for? We have had nine hundred and ninety-nine ‘discussions of the situation’ and we have yet to arrive at a single— “

  Sheridan Pike cut him off. “Jeremiah Thomas Traveller is Master of this Castle, master of the four of us, son of Granny Leeward, and representative of the Holy One upon this earth. If he says we are to discuss the situation yet one more time—or one hundred more times—then we will discuss it.”

  Feebus Timothy snorted, “The only thing in all that that impresses me
, Cousin, is the claim that he’s Leeward’s son. That I believe, it being a matter of record; and that I’m impressed by. As for the rest of it ... if you’ll pardon a phrase from the formspeech ... cowflop.”

  “You talk a good line,” said Luke Nathaniel Farson. “But I have yet to see you do more than talk.”

  Sheridan Pike moved smoothly to cover the charged silence, and observed that another discussion was not necessarily a waste of time.

  “Each time we meet,” he said, “there is the possibility that we will hit upon something we have overlooked before, colleagues. Somewhere there is a clue to be found, if only we were wise enough to spot it.”

  “The clue you seek,” retorted Feebus Timothy, “lies in pseudocoma on a narrow bed at Castle Brightwater. Where we put her, we wise Magicians of Rank, these sixteen months past.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Not nonsense,” said Nathan Overholt, knowing he plowed ground already furrowed to exhaustion, but too tired to care, “not nonsense at all. Feebus Timothy is somewhat confused, and somewhat overdramatic, but the facts of the matter are obvious. While Responsible of Brightwater went about her interfering and infuriating business on this planet, we were truly Magicians, with the power of Formalisms & Transformations at our command. From the moment we laid her in pseudocoma on that bed my cousin refers to so poetically, our power began to wane ... and now it is gone. Entirely, completely, wholly gone. Magic is gone ... and on Tinaseeh we have no science. The question is: why?”

  “We have no science because we never needed it,” said Sheridan Pike disgustedly. “Magic was a great deal faster than science ever hoped to be, and far more efficient.”

  “No, no ... that was not my question! And you know it, don’t you?”

  “Of course I know it!”

  “Then stop playing the fool!”

  “He is not playing the fool,” said Luke Nathaniel wearily, “he is just cross, like the rest of us. And we have considered that question so many times already.”

  “Magic,” said Nathan Overholt, “is a great web, a great web in always changing equilibrium. Touch it anywhere, change it anyhow, and you affect the whole. When we removed Responsible of Brightwater from that web— “

  “We haven’t removed her. She’s in better health than any of us. In pseudocoma you don’t need to eat.”

  “In a sense,” Nathan Overholt went on, “we removed her. We changed her from an active principle to a passive one ... and yet she is a female. How can a female represent an active principle?”

  “Granny Leeward is exceedingly ‘active’ with the Long Whip,” observed Luke Nathaniel. “And she is female.”

  “She is not a principle—she is only an item.”

  Feebus Timothy longed to lay his head, still aching from the screams or Avalon of Wommack, down on the table, right then and there, and go to sleep. They had been over it. And over it. The difference between an item and a principle. The difference between substitution of a null term and substitution of a specified term. The degree of shift in an equation sufficient to destroy its reversibility—or restore it. And over and over ... what role had Responsible of Brightwater, a girt of fifteen like any other girl of fifteen to the eye, played in that equation, such that the cancellation of her input had been enough to destroy the entire system?

  There were never any answers. That she had known a little magic, some of it more advanced than was suitable for a female or even legal, they all knew. The four of them had been present when Responsible fell into Granny Leeward’s trap and changed the old woman’s black fan into a handful of rotting jet-black mushrooms before their astonished eyes. Jeremiah Thomas Traveller had been mightily impressed by that, as the Granny had intended him to be.

  But they were Magicians of Rank. It was a Transformation, certainly, and the girl should not have been able to do it, but it was trivial. It was a baby trick, such as any one of them might have done—in a less ugly way—to entertain guests at a celebration of some kind. It was probable that it had been as much blind luck as skill, and mostly the product of the girl’s rage; for she had lain in torment while they watched her and mocked her misery, suffering from the gift of Andersen’s Disease, that deathdance fever that Granny Leeward had ordered them to impose as punishment for her scandalous behavior. And she’d shown no sign of any talent for things magical but that one ... nor had she been able to stand against them when the nine Magicians of Rank had chosen to impose pseudocoma upon her or during the months that had dragged by since. If there was something special about her, why had she not leaped up from that bed and laughed at them and put all of them into pseudocoma?

  It was hopeless.

  “It’s hopeless,” he said aloud. “Hopeless.”

  The others looked at him, suddenly caught by the nuance of his voice. He was young, and he was inexperienced, but he had been a skilled Magician of Rank. Now they detected something ... a note of petulance. Petulance?

  Nathan Overholt Traveller reached over abruptly and laid his hand on the younger man’s forehead and swore a broad word.

  “He’s burning up with fever!” he said. “One of you get the Granny, and tell her to lose no time coming down here!”

  It had been bound to happen sooner or later. Sickness, the Master of this Castle had been telling everyone, sickness and death, were nothing more than the marks of wickedness and sin made visible in the flesh. Only the Holy One culling the rotten fruit from the crop and leaving the sound and the wholesome behind. It made an entertaining sermon, and perhaps dulled grief for some ... after all, if those that suffered and died deserved their fate, then what was there to grieve over?

  But the Magicians of Rank had been uneasy, listening. For if one of them, one of the Magicians of Rank, one of the Family, were to fall sick or, the Twelve Gates forbid, to die—how was that to be explained? The urgency of preventing that had provided them with a shaky justification for the extra rations they shared in secret in the Castle, while tadlings cried with hunger in the houses of the town. Eggs, they had been eating ... it was safe to assume that no one else on Tinaseeh had seen an egg in six months or more, much less eaten one. And now this? It must not happen.

  “Why call the Granny?” demanded one of the others, and Nathan Overholt took time from rubbing the temples of his brother’s head to give him a look of contempt.

  “We have no magic now, you benastied fool,” he spat, beside himself with worry, and his elegant manners and speech forgotten for once, “and no medicine either. We have nothing—except what the Grannys know. The ancient simples. The herbs and teas and potions and plasters of the times before magic, the Holy One have mercy on us all! Now get her!”

  “Nathan Overholt— “

  “You think,” shouted Nathan, “you think that if one of us falls to a fever we will be able to stand on the whipping ground and convince the people of Tinaseeh that we order that Whip laid on out of our own innocence of all sin? You think that Granny Leeward would scruple to set that Long Whip to your back, or to mine, if that seemed necessary to further the cause of the Chosen People? Dozens, man, don’t you realize that if Feebus Timothy has it we may all be in the same fix, whatever it is—and it could be anything? Now go!”

  He went around behind his brother and clasped the young man’s head in his hands, closing his eyes, concentrating fiercely. It was an act he knew to be only superstition. But perhaps. Perhaps there was still some fragment of healing in it. He could not do nothing at all. He had no desire to die like Avalon of Wommack had died; nor did he want to learn how many strokes of the Long Whip it would take to kill a strong man in reasonably good condition.

  Chapter 2

  Mount Troublesome was not much, as mountains go; it peaked at a tad past four thousand feet, and it hadn’t a glacier or a crevasse to its name. On the other hand, though it didn’t live up to the “Mount” part, it more than made up for that in its fidelity to the “Troublesome” part. It missed no smallest opportunity for ravines to get stuck in and caves to g
et lost in and vast thickets to be scratched ragged in; and it was abundantly generous in poisonous ivies and creepers winding along the ground and up around the trees to hang down and smack you in the face. Springs were everywhere, trickling along under matted undergrowth that looked solid as a stable roof, till you set foot on it and sank in icy water up to your knees. There were waterfalls’ enough to go around, pretty white water gushing over sheer rock faces into pools circled by ferns and nearwillows. The pools were tempting to the eye, and might of been pleasant-feeling, but you waded them at your peril and the pleasure of dozens of small ferocious yellow snakes with ingeniously notched teeth. It did happen to be a fact that Mount Troublesome was the tallest thing on the entire continent of Marktwain.

  The seven old women toiling their way up its tangled sides were more than satisfied with the obstacles it presented. If it had been any worse, there was considerable doubt in their minds that they could of made it to the top at all.

  “Drat the ornery female!” Granny Sherryjake had declared after the second time a whole hour had to be wasted finding a way round a berry thicket as impenetrable as solid rock and twice as unpleasant. And she went on to expand on that, and elaborate on it, and weave variations on it, as the hours went by and it became obvious that there was no way they could reach the top before nightfall. They’d be overnighting out on the mountain.

  But Granny Hazelbide, that was in residence along with Granny Gableframe at Castle Brightwater, had taken exception to that. It was fully appropriate, she’d said, slapping back at a branch that had slapped her first, for a woman named Troublesome to choose a mountain named Troublesome when she went into exile.

  “Fully appropriate, and seemly,” said Granny Hazelbide. “I’d of done the same exact thing, in her place.”

  “Well,” grumbled Sherryjake, “there may be something to what you say.”

  “I should hope and declare there is. Naming is naming!”

  “But,” went on the other doggedly, “I do not see that there was any special merit to be gained from her establishing herself at the very most tip top of this accursed hump of dirt and rock. She was not named Peak of Troublesome, you know. Halfway up would of done it, seems to me. Quarterways up.”