Ozark Trilogy 3: And Then There'll Be Fireworks (7 page)

“Jordan Sanderleigh,” said the Granny, and she measured her words out one by one and hammered them in with the tip of her cane, “when this war began, a Solemn Council was held. All the Families of Arkansaw, there assembled. And it was agreed that we were
O
zarkers, not barbarians such as we left on Old Earth because we despised them worse than vermin! And it was agreed that in the name of decency,
to
which we still lay claim, I hope, no Arkansawyer would use a laser against another or against another’s holdings. Signed it was, and sealed. And we’ll not be the ones as goes back on it.”

The man flung himself down on the nearest window ledge and closed his eyes. He remembered the occasion well. Himself, King of Farson; James John the 17
^th
, King of Guthrie; the three Purdy Senators ... the Granny was right that they were fools, all they could do was squabble among themselves, but they’d had dignity that day, the Purdy crest on their shoulders and their staffs of office in their hands. And the women, all absent to show their disapproval, but willing when it was over to admit that if there had to be a war it was a considerable improvement over the ancient kind for them to meet before it and set up its conditions. He had not been ashamed that day, and he had not been poor; he had been eager to get at the war, to settle once and for all the question of who should be first on Arkansaw, to be done with it and take up their lives once again. And he had been more than willing to sign that treaty banning the lasers ... it was civilized.

“We all die, then,” he said aloud. “Slowly. Like fools and lunatics.”

The Granny hesitated not one second. “So be it,” she said.

“Ah, you women are hard,” mourned the man.

“Ah, you men are fools. And lunatics.” Marycharlotte of Wommack mocked him, matching her tones exactly to his. And he said nothing more.

Out in the ravaged Wilderness Lands of Arkansaw the struggle went on, as it had for near twelve months now. First there had been the preliminary squabbling, as each of the Castles moved to lay out that
it
should rule over all on Arkansaw henceforth, and be first among the three Kingdoms, and had thought to do that with words and threats and strutting about. There’d been no idiot behavior such as had disgraced Castle Smith, no purple velvet and ermine and jeweled scepters and Dukes and Duchesses—a King and a Queen, dressed as they’d always dressed, that had sufficed. But it had never occurred to either Farson or Guthrie that the two other Castles would argue about their obvious and predestined supremacy on the continent.

And then when it became obvious to everybody that neither Farson nor Guthrie would ever accept the other, and that Castle Purdy would never do more than wait to see which was the winner so that it could join that side, there had been the period of drawing back to the Castles to decide what was to be done. There had been the shameful ravaging of the tiny continent of Mizzurah off Arkansaw’s western coast, both the Kingdoms of Lewis and of Motley, so that that land which had been the greenest and fairest of all Ozark now looked like the aftertime of a series of plagues and visitations of the wrath of some demented god. Not that Mizzurah had wanted any part in the feuds of Arkansaw, but that Arkansaw had been desperate for even Mizzurah’s pitiful resources.

And then the war had broken out—with the dignified meeting first, of course, to lay down the rules—and it dragged on still. Civil war.

When the citizens of Mizzurah had been ordered to join in the fighting on Arkansaw, they had made it more than clear that no amount of harassment would bring them to any such pass, so that it had been necessary for the Arkansawyers to take the Masters of Castles Motley and Lewis and hold them hostage at Castle Guthrie as surety against their people’s obedience.

And now the men of Mizzurah fought alongside the men of Arkansaw, divided up three ways among the three Castles as was fair and proper, since it was that or see the hostages hung, or worse; but they spoke not one word, and they never would. In silence, they drew their knives, that had been intended for the merciful killing of herdbeasts, and used them on other Ozarkers as they were commanded, excepting always the delicate care they used to be sure they raised no hand against another Mizzuran. In the same silence they dropped great boulders from Arkansaw’s cliffs down on columns of climbing men, and threw staffs of Tinaseeh ironwood to pin men against those cliffs for a death not one of them would have inflicted on
any
animal. The officers had the few rifles, and no Mizzuran was an officer, which meant they had no shooting to do, and that was probably just as well. The Lewises were without question the best shots on Ozark, having always fancied the sport of shooting at targets, and keeping it up over the centuries when most of the Families had let the skill fall away into disuse.

The Mizzurah women fought beside their men, those not required back at home to care for tadlings and babes. “If the men must go, we go also,” they’d said, and the women of Arkansaw, that would have nothing to do with the civil war among their men themselves, had nodded their heads in approval. It was fitting, and they would have done the same, had the situations been the same. They had been much embarrassed when a Purdy female, a tad confused about what was after all a complicated ethical question, took up an ironwood staff and marched off to join her older brother in the Battle of Saints Beard Creek; and it was the women of Castle Parson, happening to be closest, that had gone out and got the tool creature and brought her back to a willow switch across her bare buttocks, for all she was sixteen years of age. If that was what it took to make things clear at Castle Purdy, that was what it took, and they had not scrupled to do it.

Thirty men, two of them Mizzurans, were dug in at a mine entrance near the border of Farson Kingdom under the command of Nicholas Andrew Guthrie the 41
^st
, on this day. Three days they’d been there now, and though water was plentiful it was fouled—that’d be the work of the Purdys, upstream—and the food was gone since the night before.

Their leader stared sullenly into the drizzle, and sat in the slimy packed layers of wet leaves at the mine-mouth, and would not be persuaded to go inside where it was at least dry.

“The sentries have to stay out here,” he pointed out.

“You’re not a sentry.”

“All the same.”

“It’s foolishness,” objected another Guthrie, close kin enough to offer open criticism regardless of rank. “What’ll you gain that way, except pneumonia?”

“Pneumonia,” said Nicholas Andrew Guthrie. “And I welcome it. Rather die that way than most of the other possibilities ... at least it’s an honorable death.”

“Not if you leave your men without a leader by catching it, you blamed pigheaded fool!”

Nicholas Andrew Guthrie didn’t even turn his head.

“What you talk there is the talk of a war that’s real,” he said, and spat to show his disgust. “This is no real war, and I’m no real leader, and youall’re no real soldiers. And you’d be no more leaderless without me than you are while I sit here and court the passing germs, so shut your mouth.”

“That’s inspiring talk,” said his cousin. “Really makes us all feel like throwing ourselves into the heat of battle, let me tell
you
.”

“You want inspiration,” said Nicholas Andrew, “you go home and get some. You’ll get none out here. Here, you’ve got nothing whatsoever to do but wait for a Farson, or might could be some pitiful Purdy, lost as usual, to show up, so you can stick him through the gut with whatever’s handy, or him you. Might could be you’d even have the privilege of doing your gutsticking on a Mizzurah woman, just for the variety of the thing. And everybody can cut one more notch on the timber nearest them to signify the occasion. That inspire you? It doesn’t inspire me, not the least bit.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the constant nameless noise the drizzle made. And then a man spoke from behind them. “How many do you reckon there are left of us?” He had a festering sore on his leg, that would get no better in this damp, and a bandage to his shoulder, and he leaned against the mine wall to keep from falling. “How many, sir?”

My brave and stalwart company,
thought Nicholas Andrew wryly.
My company of walking dead. Flourish of trumpets, roll of drums, off left.
Aloud, he said he didn’t know.

“What with the bad food, and the sickness there’s neither magic nor medicine to treat, and what with the cold, and this bleeding twelvesquare excuse for a war ... there might could be two thousand of us, all told.”

“Two thousand, Nicholas Andrew Guthrie!” The man staggered and clutched at nothing, and somebody moved quickly to grab the shoulder that wasn’t hurt.

“Come on, now,” said the kinsman hastily, “you don’t mean that, and it’s a downright cruel thing to say.”

“Well, I stand by it,” snapped Nicholas Andrew. “And if only a Purdy or a Farson’d come by this place, might could be we’d be able to make that one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.”

There was silence behind him again, and he hoped it would last this time; he had no heart for talking to them. The figure he’d named was a blind guess, but it could not be much more than that. Taking it in round numbers, there’d been ninety thousand of them when this began; fifty thousand Guthries, twenty thousand Farsons, and twenty thousand Purdys. At least sixteen thousand Lewises and Motleys combined, he’d hazard. And what was left would hardly make one good-sized village ... and nothing gained for it, nor nothing
ever
to be gained. Over those centuries when violence was just something in stories and songs around the fire, and an evil something at that, the Ozarkers had forgotten what their native stubbornness would mean if it were put to violent purposes.

It meant nobody would ever yield. It meant nobody would ever give up, ever say, “All
right
, let’s stop before every last one of us is dead in this mess. All
right
—
you
can be the winner, if that’s what it takes to stop this!”

It would never happen. When only two Arkansawyers of different Kingdoms still remained alive on this land, they would be fighting hand to hand—with two rocks, if that was all they had left to fight with, as seemed likely. And it would be a fight to that death. It seemed sometimes that somebody ought to of remembered, when it started, what a war would be like when there could be
no giving up ever
...but nobody had.

The Gentles had no doubt gone deep into the bowels of the earth; not one had been seen since the first day of the fighting. And if they simply waited there long enough, they would have Arkansaw back for their own again, what was left of it, without a single Ozarker to trouble them.

“I think I hear something,” whispered a boy at his side, crawling up close to whisper it in his ear. “Want I should go take a look?”

“You step outside this mine-mouth,” said Nicholas Andrew flatly, and right out loud, “and provided you did indeed hear something, you’ll be picked off before your beautiful blue eyes can blink twice.”

“Oh ... I thought I could get out there, quick-like, and scout around.”

Nicholas Andrew was so weary of explaining what two and two added up to, and explaining it to babes barely out of their diapers ... He drew a long breath, and tried to sound patient.

“Supposing you did hear something, son,” he said, “and supposing it was a human being and one fighting against us. Either he’ll stay where he is, which’ll do us no harm, or he’ll come out into the open where we can pick him off from here—which’ll do us no harm. If he made a noise, you can be sure the idea was to get one of
us
to come out and be picked off. Otherwise, he’d of kept quiet. You follow all that?”

“Yes, sir,” said the boy. “Yes, sir, I do. I expect I’m mighty ignorant.”

“I expect you’re mighty young,” said Nicholas Andrew. “Now get back inside where it’s safer.”

Ignorance. He thought about ignorance. His own military training had been composed of a speech made to a couple dozen like him. They’d all been told that war wasn’t much different from hunting, always excepting what the quarry was, and that they’d been picked for their natural qualities of leadership and their good health, and that they were expected to use their common sense. That had been the sum total of it.

At Castle Guthrie the state of despair was not quite so complete as it was out in the Wilderness Lands or at the other two Castles. Castle Guthrie had been richest to begin with; it was richest still, though its poverty was astonishing. And it had the two hostages, two living symbols that some real action had once been taken—Salem Sheridan Lewis the 43
^rd
, and Halbreth Nicholas Smith the 12
^th
, him as was husband to Diamond of Motley and Master of Motley Castle. Whether he would have stayed on as Master there after the Confederation of Continents was dissolved, or gone back to Smith Kingdom to join his kin, there’d not been time for anybody to find out. Before the issue could be resolved, he’d found himself hostage here; and might could be there were times when he was thankful for the curious chance of it. It would not of been easy for him to choose between his own household—his wife and his children—and his kin. Especially when his kin were known to out-Purdy the Purdys for stupidity.

Around the one fire they had burning in the Castle, the Guthries sat in Council. James John Guthrie the 17
^th
, another threadbare King; Myrrh of Guthrie, his sixth cousin and his queen as well; Michael Stepforth Guthrie the 11
^th
, Magician of Rank (for all that signified these days); three older sons and an odd cousin or two.