The Ozark trilogy

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  First, she’d wait for another sight of that great tail split three ways. And then probably she’d wait for the royal purple of the thing’s flesh to show up clear in the gray of the sea. And when both had happened, assuming they did happen, she’d think it over—and might could be she’d go below and swallow a dose to cure her of her mindfollies.

  The Teaching Story had not one word extra to spare on the subject of the creature she half thought she’d seen. The fuel on The Ship had gone bad. Every last thing had been going from bad to worse. The time had come when it was land or die; and then just as they made a desperate plunge toward the planet below them the engines gave up completely and The Ship fell into the Outward Deeps. At which point, as the Grannys taught it:

  Even as the water closed over the dying ship and First Granny told the children to stop their caterwauling and prepare to meet their Maker with their mouths shut and their eyes open, a wonderful thing happened. Just a wonderful thing!

  Forty of them there were, shaped like the great whales of Earth, but that their tails split three ways instead of two. And their color was the royal purple, the purple of majestic sovereignty.

  They met The Ship as it fell, rising up in a circle as it sank toward the bottom. And they bore it up on their backs as easy as a man packs a baby, and laid it out in the shallows, where the Captain and the crew could get The Ship’s door open, and everybody could wade right out of there to safety.

  They were the Wise Ones, so named by First Granny; and it may be that they live there still in the Outward Deeps ...

  And it may be that they don’t. A thousand years ago, that was, that First Granny had looked into the huge eye of one of them and seen there something she claimed at once for wisdom, and no least sign of them since in all this long time. They could certainly all have died—long, long ago. If ever they were real, that is, and not an illusion born of desperation and nourished on Grannytalk.

  No other Teaching Story made mention of them, and no song; not even a scrap of a saying referred to them. It made them most unlikely traveling companions! Why, even the creatures of Old Earth, those left-behind ones that nobody’d seen since before the Ozarkers left their home planet, came up now and again in sayings. Take the groundhog; what a groundhog might be, Troublesome couldn’t have said. There was nothing whatsoever in that computer databanks about them, nor anywhere else. But she knew easy enough from the roles groundhogs took in daily converse that they couldn’t of been any kind of hog— “Quick as a groundhog down a hole!” the Grannys would say. “No bigger’n the ear on a groundhog!”

  “Saw its shadow and popped under like a groundhog!” Had to of been little, and quick, and somehow significant; you could figure that out from the scraps. But the creatures of the Outward Deeps? They were mentioned nowhere atall, and what mysterious purpose might bring one to be her escort now ... She sighed. It wasn’t reasonable; but then her ignorance was great.

  Troublesome turned her head to the wind and took a deep breath of the salt air to drown out some of the fish stink, and gathered her shawls closer round her, wrinkling her nose as the blown spray spattered her face. It would come up a rain shortly, she was sure, and the men would be blaming her for it. Law, what wouldn’t she give to have had the weather skills they were willing to lay to her account! Now that would of been of some use. Dry fields she could of watered, and high winds taking off the good topsoil she could of tempered, and where the rivers were bringing sullen rot to the roots of growing things she could of driven back the clouds and let the sun see to drying them out. There’d of been a good deal less hunger on Ozark if she’d been able to turn her hand to such work as that.

  Instead of which, she thought, reality falling back over her with a thump, she was off on the wildest of goose chases, set her by seven dithering Grannys. Off to see the Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd—

  No special wonder her sister had lusted after the man and taken him so willingly to her bed. There was no prettiness to him, no softness anywhere, but he was a man to feast the hungry eyes on, not to mention a few other senses-He gave off a kind of drawing warmth that naturally made you want to shelter in it, male or female—as she herself gave off a cold wind that said, Stand Back! If lust had been one of the emotions known to her she might very well have fancied him her own self; in a kind of abstract fashion, she could see that. But handy though he might be in a bed, the idea that some act of his lay behind Responsible’s sorry condition, or that he could do anything to improve it ... ah, that was only foolishness. Troublesome had no hope for the journey’s end; she traveled to Kintucky for the excellent reason that she’d never been there and might never have a second chance, and because curiosity was one of the emotions she was familiar with.

  There were times, in point of fact, when she found herself so curious about the workings of this world that the lack of any source to ask questions of was almost a physical pain. At such times, there being no purpose to such a feeling, she was grateful for the mountain to take out her energies on, and she welcomed the work given her to do though she understood it scarcely atall. She would go at her loom then with a vengeance, making the shuttle fly, singing ballads so old she didn’t know what half the words meant. Unlike her sister, she could sing to pleasure even the demanding ear, and when her audience was only birds and small creatures she didn’t mind doing it. There was nobody on the mountain to wonder at a female singing out. “I go to Troublesome to mourn and weep” when the word was her very name, nor to pity her for the next line all about sleeping unsatisfied, nor to wonder as she changed tunes where Waltzing Hayme might be. She loved the queer ancient songs and valued them far above such frippery as was sung these modem days.

  Thinking of it, she very nearly began to sing, and then remembered the five men—it would not do to have them hear her singing and carry the tale of it back to Brightwater. She closed her lips firmly on the riddling song she’d almost let escape, and resolved to close her mind just as tight to the questions running round there. She’d get no answers to them in her lifetime, and might could be it wasn’t meant that humans should have those answers. Might could be, for instance, that they were the proper knowledge of the Wise Ones, kept in trust against a time when they might be needed ...

  Granny Hazelbide, commenting to the little girls on the Teaching Story about the saving of the Ozarkers at First Landing, always said the same thing: “First Granny looked right into the eyes of one of them, just right into its eyes! And she said then and there, no hesitating and no pondering on it, ‘They are the Wise Ones,’ and no doubt that is so.”

  Perhaps, thought Troublesome. Perhaps. She’d seen eyes to creatures that looked to contain all the secrets of the universe. The feydeer, for example, along the ridges above timberline. They had eyes you could gaze into forever, and they had minds as empty as a shell left behind by its tenant and scoured out by a determined housewife. Rain gave them a fever that became a pneumonia and kept them few in number, but they hadn’t sense enough to go down a few feet on the mountain where they could have stood beneath a tree or under a ledge out of the weather. They just waited, shaking and bedraggled, for the rain to kill them off. It gave the lie to those eyes, for all they looked so knowing.

  She had a firm intention, if there was indeed a Wise One keeping this dilapidation of a boat company for some purpose of its own; and it was that intention that kept her here with her eyes fixed to the water, hour after hour. She wanted to look, her own self, “right into” the eye of the sea creature. It would be an eye to remember, if it were no more a gate to wisdom than the feydeer’s! Judging by the tail she thought she’d caught a glimpse of, be the animal truly wise or truly foolish it was as big as this boat. The eyes would be ... how big? The size of her head, with a pupil to match? Might could be. Law, to see that, to give it a look as it rose to dive, and to get a look back! That would be a thing to remember all her days and all her nights, and she had no intention of missing it if it came her way. She had no other chores; she would sit here
and watch over the water for that exchange of glances, all the way to Kintucky and all the way back if need be.

  The men turned surly eventually, as was to be expected. And after they’d seen Troublesome well onto the land the captain thought it prudent to let them talk it out of their systems while the boat rode at anchor.

  They went on awhile about their various disgruntlements, allowing as how they were sorry they ever let the Grannys tempt them to this forsaken place. Allowing as how they’d never before seen a Mule swim the sea with a woman on its back and they called that witchery and they’d like to hear the captain deny them that. And they did a ditty on the short rations—as if they were any shorter than they’d been ashore—and another on the constant drizzling rain that had pursued them all the way and looked likely to pursue them all the way back, and they’d like to hear the captain deny them that!

  Adam Sheridan Brightwater was wise in the ways of surly men; he denied nothing, made uninterpretable noises when they drew breath and seemed to expect a response, and let them wear themselves out. Only when they were reduced to muttering that if she hadn’t been a woman, by the Holy One, they’d of gone off and left her and her bedamned Mule to tend for themselves did he add anything to the conversation. Seeing as there was no knowing how long they’d be there waiting for her, he thought it might be better to turn their minds from the idea of abandoning her in the Kintucky forests and heading for home.

  “What do you suppose she was looking at back there all that time?” he threw out, rubbing at his beard. “That has got to be the lookingest woman ever I did see ... and nothing to look at but water, water, and still more water. Thought her eyes would drop right out of her head.”

  “I don’t know what it was she was staring after,” Gabriel John answered him promptly, “but I know one thing—it never turned up, and she’s given up on it.”

  “How do you know that?

  “Heard her. This is a mighty small boat, if you hadn’t noticed that already, for keeping secrets on.”

  “What’d she say?” demanded Black Michael, and when Gabriel John told them they whistled long and low.

  “No woman says that,” declared Haven McDaniels Brightwater.

  “She did.” Gabriel John was staunch as staunch. “Right in a string, she said it, three broad words such as I never heard before at one time in the mouth of a man. And I saw her give the gunwales a kick that I doubt did her foot much good. In a right smart temper, she was!”

  “We could ask her,” Michael Callaway proposed.

  “Ask her? You enjoy being dogbit, Michael Callaway?”

  “There’s no dogs on this boat, you damned fool! Mules, but no dogs. Talk sense, why don’t you!”

  Black Michael gave him an equally black look and smacked his thigh with the flat of his hand and called him a damned fool.

  “You ask her a question,” he said, “shell take your head right off at the armpits! Dogbit’s not a patch on it, I can tell you. Why, I had the uppity gall to ask her highandmightyness could I help her with a jammed hatch, Michael Callaway, and I near lost part of my most valuable anatomy when she flung it back at me ... you’d of thought I’d offered to toss her skirts up and tumble her, tall scrawny gawk that she is, and I meant her only a kindness! Huh! I say leave her alone, as the Grannys directed, and be grateful if she follows suit. Womanbit, that’s what you’ll be otherwise ... or womankicked, or womanstung, or worse!”

  Captain Brightwater nodded his agreement with that as a general policy, it being somewhat more than obvious, and the nods went slowly all round.

  “Maybe she’ll sight whatever it was on the way back after all,” he said easily. “And maybe that’ll make her pleasanter to be around. We can hope.”

  Troublesome, doing her best to keep the branches from whipping Dross into a refusal to go on through the Kintucky Wilderness, was not expecting any such thing. The tail she’d seen again, a time or two, and a flash of purple. Sufficient to prove that the animal was there and as real as she was. But had it meant her to see anything more, had it intended a shared glance, it would have happened by now, and she’d resigned herself to that. She’d not be staring over the water on the trip back, yearning after what she was not to have.

  She only hoped they’d make it back to Marktwain, Glad as she was that they hadn’t seen their huge companion, those stalwart sailing men, and determined as she was to let slip no careless word now or later, she was astonished. It seemed to her that they might well have trouble even finding Marktwain again, it being no bigger than a continent. What kind of sailors were they, that an animal the size of their boat could swim alongside them from one side of the ocean to the other, and them never even notice it? Come time to land again, she might have to point them out the coast or they’d sail right on past.

  “ gusting,” she said to Dross, who said nothing back, but whuffled at her in a way Troublesome was willing to take for confirmation. “Plain disgusting!”

  Chapter 4

  “I say we should use the lasers, and the devil take the treaties.” The King of Parson Kingdom took a look at their faces and shivered in the cold, and he said it over again, louder and clearer, to be sure they’d heard him.

  There’d been a day when a statement like that, all naked and unadorned and enough to shock the whiskers off a grown man’s face, would have been cushioned somewhat by the rugs and draperies and furnishings of Castle Parson. No longer. The Castle had been stripped of everything that had any value, and it was nothing now but a great hulk of stone in which every word echoed and bounced from wall to wall and down the bare corridors. Any citizen choosing to look in the windows at the royal Family might do so; no curtains hung there. And the chair where Granny Dover sat pursing her lips at the King’s scandalous talk was the only chair they had left; a rocker for the Granny in residence, and a courtesy to her old bones. As for the rest of them, they sat on the floor and leaned against the wall, or dragged up the rough workbenches that had once been out in the stables and now served for eating meals. When there were meals, which was far from always.

  “Jordan Sanderleigh Parson the 23rd,” said the Granny grimly—she’d never said “Your Majesty” to him nor ever would— “you’ve been hinting at that, and tippytoeing around that, these last three days now ... but I never thought I’d live to hear you come right out and say it in so many words.”

  “And only blind luck that you have lived that long,” the man retorted.

  “No,” said the old lady. “Many a thing as has changed in these terrible times, many a thing. Kings at Farson and Guthrie, ‘stead of Masters of the Castle, as has been since First Landing and is decent and respectable! Three old fools at Castle Purdy calling themselves Senators, if you please, and splitting the Kingdom’s governance three ways, when they never could run it even when it wasn’t split and they had tradition to give ‘em a clue what to do every now and again!”

  “Granny, don’t start,” begged the King, but she paid him no mind whatsoever.

  “But the day’s not come yet,” she went on. “when an Ozarker—always excepting the filthy Magicians of Rank, that, praise be, have had their teeth pulled anyway—when an Ozarker would raise a hand to harm a Granny. I’ll be here a while yet, if we do live on weeds and bad fish. I’ll be here a while.”

  Marycharlotte of Wommack, huddled against the draft in a corner more or less sheltered from the wind, challenged her husband and drew her shawl tighter round her shoulders.

  “We gave our word,” she flung at him, “as did Castles Guthrie and Purdy! We aren’t degraded enough, living worse than animals in a cave—at least they have fur enough to keep them warm, or sense enough to sleep the winter out—we aren’t degraded enough? Eating thin soup three times a day, made like the Granny says out of weeds and roots and one bad fish to a kettleful, and the Twelve Gates only knows what people not at the Castle must be living on! That’s not enough for you yet? All the animals slaughtered, all the children and the old people sick, and the young ones fa
st joining them, that won’t satisfy you men? Must we be liars and traitors as well, before you’ve had enough?”

  Jordan Sanderleigh Farson turned his back on his Queen and spoke to the wall before him, down which a skinny trickle of water ran day and night from the damp and the fog.

  “We cannot go on like this,” he said dully.

  “There’s a choice?”

  “We cannot go on fighting a war,” answered the King, “grown men from a time when ships can travel from star to star and computers can send messages over countless thousands of miles ... fighting a war with sticks, and boulders, and knives, and a handful of rifles meant for hunting or taken out of display cases at the museums. You should see it out there, you two ... you’re so smug, you should go take a long look. It’s a giant foolery, entirely suitable for the comedy at a lowquality fair in a Purdy back county. Except that people are not laughing, you know. People are dying.”

  “I thought that’s what you wanted,” said Marycharlotte. “People dying.”

  “You made it right plain that was what you wanted, all you men,” Granny Dover backed her up. “No question.”

  The man leaned against the wall, whether it was despair or exhaustion or both they did not know, and shouted at the two of them.

  “We never had any intention that it was to drag on and on and on like this!” he roared. “A week or two, we thought, maybe a month or two at worst and a few hundred dead, and then it would be over! This isn’t what we meant to have happen ... oh, the Holy One help me in a bitter hour, it was never what was intended, never!”