The Ozark trilogy (69 page)

“Coming from you, Michael Stepforth,” put in Myrrh of Guthrie, “that
does
sound half-witted. I’ll back the Granny on that. We may all have started even, so far as luck was concerned, when we began this—everything fair and square. But when we brought the Masters of Lewis and Motley into this Castle and put them under guard, them as had no quarrel with us nor ever wanted any, nor ever raised a hand against any Arkansawyer ... then we changed that luck considerably.”

“Purdy and Farson were in on that, too!”

“Purdy and Farson don’t have the hostages—Castle Guthrie has them,” said the Granny grimly. “A Guthrie stands guard by their doors. A Guthrie takes them their rations, and checks to be sure their bonds are adequate. Not a Purdy, my friends, not a Farson—that is our
personal
contribution, done on our own resolve, and volunteered for, as I recollect. Nobody forced it on us. And for
that
, you mark my words, we will pay.”

“We
have
paid!” James John Guthrie looked more a madman than a monarch, roaring at the Granny and shaking his fists. But she was not impressed one whit.

“And we will pay more,” she told him. “I wouldn’t send a rowboat across a rain puddle myself, the way the Universe is stacked against this Family at this particular point in time. As for taking all the men we have left as are strong enough to fight, and all the supplies called for to last them to Brightwater, and sending them off in a ship across the Ocean of Remembrances? Pheeyeew! Why not go dig up a Gentle and shoot it, James John Guthrie? Why not jump off the Castle
roof
, for that matter, and be done with it? It’d be quicker and cleaner.”

The Granny shoved her rocker back and stood up, very slowly and carefully. Her arthritis was tormenting her, and she had a crick in her neck that was about to drive her wild, from staring up at the Guthrie men while she tongue-lashed them.

“You think it over good and long before you decide,” she said, trying not to let the pain overrule the contempt in her voice as she struggled to straighten her spine. “You think it over good and long and thorough. Might could be you ought to pray over it, too—I know
I
would. Take yourselves down to where Salem Sheridan Lewis the 43
^rd
, that good man, that
honorable
man, sits a prisoner in your Castle, and ask him to pray with you ... I reckon you’ve forgotten how, these many days past. And when your minds are made up, do me a favor—keep it to your own selves. If you decide on any such folly as that expedition off to Never-never Land, don’t you tell me about it; I don’t care to know.”

“Granny Stillmeadow,” sighed the King of Guthrie, “you’re no help atall, you know that?”

“I should hope I am not any help to you, I never intended to be for one
in
stant! Myrrh of Guthrie, you plan to sit there and listen to these idiot males go on with their claptrap, or you want to come with me and see if there’s maybe some small thing we can do upstairs for that tadling down with the fever?”

Myrrh of Guthrie looked around her once, and then she didn’t hesitate.

“I’ll be right with you. Granny,” she said.

“I’ll go on ahead,” said Cranny Stillmeadow. “The air’s cleaner outside this room.”

And with that she turned around and stalked out, leaning on her cane and striking the floor with it every step like a stick coming down hard on a drumhead. There was no possibility of mistaking the Granny’s opinion of them. Even with nothing to go on but the sight of her aching back.

Lewis Motley Wommack the 33
^rd
was feeling reasonably content with his lot. He would have gone to some pains not to admit it, since the rest of the population was of a much different mind, but he found the current Spartan regime exactly to his taste. The rooms of Castle Wommack—all four hundred of them—had always given him a vague feeling of claustrophobia; he knew why now. It had been all that furniture. The massive benches lining every hall, and the huge tapestries behind them. The draperies that you could have easily made a tent for five or six people out of, with the green velvet with twelve inches of gold fringe ... and the occasional variety of
gold
velvet, with twelve inches of green fringe. The vases of flowers and the paintings in their heavy frames, and the thick carpets, all four hundred of
them
... no, he took that back. There had never been carpets in the kitchens. Make it three hundred and ninety-seven carpets. He had been smothered by all that, but he hadn’t realized it; after all, in rooms thirty feet square, with fourteen-foot ceilings, the furnishings had been scattered around in a lot of empty space—as he recalled, there’d been a deliberate effort expressed by his cousin Gilead to keep the Castle’s decoration “spare.”

That had been her word, and he’d assumed it had some congruence with reality.

But now that it was all gone he realized that he could at last breathe freely. He liked the feel of the bare stone floors under his feet, and the look of the arched high windows open to the air and sky. He no longer felt that he had to go out and pace the balconies in the middle of the night, he was contented to pace his own almost empty room instead.

As for his once elegant wardrobe, now only a memory, and the diet of grains and root vegetables and ingeniously concocted soups that had replaced the roasts and stuffings and steaks and lavish desserts ... he had never cared about such things anyway.

And at the moment he had several specific things to be happy about. There was, for instance, the blissful ease of his mind. At first he had been like the man with a toothache that comes and goes, always braced for the next twinge out of nowhere. Now, enough time had gone by since the last intrusion from Responsible of Brightwater that he felt
secure
in his privacy. She had been a parasite coiled in his head, never mind how many hundreds of miles of physical space separated them, and he had lived in constant dread of the stirring of that ... thing ... within him; it was gone, praise the Twelve Gates and the Twelve Corners, forever.

And there was the fact that Thomas Lincoln Wommack the 9
^th
was now Master of this Castle, and had lifted from Lewis Motley’s unwilling neck the burden of Guardianship that had chafed it so mightily since the death of Thomas Lincoln’s father. He had detested being Guardian, and everything that went with it—all that constant fiddling detail—and he was firmly determined that never again would he have to administer so much as a dollhouse, or be responsible for anything more than his own person. His sister Jewel had the Teaching Order that had replaced the old comset educational system well in hand, and showed a natural talent for administration that he recognized as invaluable. He didn’t even have to worry about
that
.

Bliss, basically. Impoverished bliss, perhaps, and a nagging concern for the problems of sickness and crop failures and the like that plagued Kintucky—but it had to be admitted that all of that was out of his hands and beyond his power to alter in any way. What he could do, he did; mostly, it amounted to encouraging Jewel of Wommack and her flock of Teachers in
their
efforts, all far more productive than his could have been. The ways they found to stretch supplies, and the things they thought of when there was pain to be eased ... He admired it, loudly and openly and enthusiastically. And he thanked the Powers that none of it required anything more of him personally than that unflagging enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, he could always produce.

Thinking about it, a bowl of hot oats and half a cup of milk comforting his stomach, he leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk, folded his arms behind his head, and sighed a long sigh of satisfaction.

At which point, his door flew open without so much as a warning knock, and he found himself facing a woman taller than he was, thinner than he was, and looking much the worse for wear, though it was clear she was beautiful underneath the scrapes and the grime. It took him only a couple of minutes to recognize Troublesome of Brightwater—there was only one woman on the planet who looked like she looked—and that was such a shock that he leaped to his feet and knocked his chair over in the process.

“Uhhhh ... Troublesome of Brightwater!” he managed, and bent to pick up the chair and set it right.

“As you live and breathe,” she said.

“Well, I know it wasn’t exactly a fanfare and a red carpet, Troublesome, but you took me by surprise. I thought you spent all your time on top of a mountain and never came down except for emergencies ... like clearing a pack of rats and weasels out of Confederation Hall, for example. Not to mention that however in the world you got
here
, all the way from Brightwater, is beyond me. Surely you didn’t expect me not to be surprised?”

“May I come in or not?” Troublesome demanded. “Finding you wasn’t easy, young man, and I’m sick of prowling your halls in search of your august presence.”

“Please do come in,” said Lewis Motley readily enough. “I’m ... well, no, I can’t say I’m delighted to see you. We’ll no doubt end by regretting that you dropped by, I’m aware of that. But I am most assuredly
interested
to see you ...Do come in, and sit down.”

Troublesome’s eyes flicked over the room, and she clucked her tongue in amazement.

“What is it?”

“All this furniture.” She stepped inside and closed the door behind her. “Brightwater’s got a rocker for the Grannys, and beds all around, and that’s about it. Everything else has gone for firewood long ago.”

“I was just thinking how
bare
it was. And how much I liked it bare.”

“A matter of your point of view, I expect,” said Troublesome. “It looks mighty grand to this pair of eyes.”

“You’re on Kintucky,” he reminded her. “How, I don’t know—we’ll come back to that. But on Kintucky we could burn fires day and night for a hundred years and we’d still only have cut down the undergrowth. If we could eat trees, we’d be well fed here.”

Troublesome reached for the offered chair, turned it backwards so she could lean her arms and chin on its back, and stared at him until he began to feel uncomfortable. And then it dawned on him why he felt that way, and he hollered till he got a servingmaid’s attention and told her to bring up some food and drink.

“Not that it’ll be much,” he warned her. “Bread, I expect. And coffee, if we’re lucky and Gilead’s set some by for the odd special occasion.”

“Considering it’s been near on two days since I’ve had anything but water ... and you do have glorious water on Kintucky, I meant to comment on that ... I’m not likely to complain. And the Mule I left in your stable was not the least bit ungrateful for what he was getting there.”

“The Mule,” mused Lewis Motley Wommack. “You came in by Mule, did you? Now, Troublesome, I don’t mean to seem to doubt your word, but— “

“Just from the coast,” she sighed. “One leg after another, solid on the ground. The rest of the trip was in a pathetic beerkeg that’s got the nerve to call itself a ship, and for which the only good word I’ve got to offer is that it didn’t sink on the way over here. No doubt it’ll make up for that oversight on the trip back, always providing it’ll still even
be
there when the Mule and I trek back down to the shore. No, Lewis Motley Wommack, I am not claiming I can get a Mule to fly; I had trouble enough getting it to move atall.”

“Well, it might have been that you could. Considering your reputation.”

Troublesome let that pass, and he went on.

“
Will
you tell me why you’re here and how you got here?” he insisted; he was rapidly running out of patience. “It’s about as likely as a goat playing a dulcimer, you know. I think I’m entitled to an explanation.”

“Passel of Grannys sent me,” said Troublesome. “They near killed themselves, poor old things, getting up Mount Troublesome to talk me into it and then back down again. And they used up everything they had left in this world to bribe the captain of that purely pathetic boat and his patheticker crew, and putting together supplies enough for this carry-on. The supplies they meant me to have while I rode the Mule here, those
I
left for bribe, along with a trinket or two, to keep my trusty friends from heading back to Brightwater and stranding me here. And the Holy One defend them if they do strand me ... if I have to
swim
back, I’ll find them, every last one of them, and they’ll rue the day they ever did any such a misbegotten trashy thing.”

“Oh, they’ll be there,” said Lewis Motley.

“You think so?”

“You put it very well,” he said, looking at the ceiling. “I doubt very much they’d care to have your lifelong vengeance on their coattails, Troublesome of Brightwater.”

“Let us hope you are right,” said Troublesome grimly. “For their sakes, and everybody else’s.”

“How does everybody else figure into it?” he asked, and she passed along the Grannys’ tale to him, while he sat there shaking his head. For a while it was his wonderment at the Grannys going to all this trouble and expense, and Troublesome going along with it, for no more motivation than some old tea leaves and a gold ring on a thread in a stray wind. And then when it began to be clear to him that it had to do with Responsible of Brightwater, it was his dis-ease at the position he was being put in. True, this was Responsible’s infamous sister; and true, if there was anything bodacious to do, she’d either done it or invented it. But there was such a thing as tattling, and there were certain kinds of tattling that were even more despicable than other kinds, and he felt like a skinnywiggler on a hot rock before she got to the end of it.