The Ozark trilogy (9 page)

I decided I was not expendable, and whatever firepower I had I’d best use it at its most potent. There was nobody around to see and wonder at a woman using that level of magic, and if there had been I would not have been in any mood to care. Formalisms & Transformations it would be, and all out—now which one? I was a mite short on equipment.

The cave smelled worse than the cavecat, which I wouldn’t of thought possible in advance. Not that it was fouled—no cat does that, whatever its size—but it had lived there a long time, and it was a tom, and it had marked out all the limits of its territory with great care. It slouched in under a hole in the ground that I doubted I would of spotted as the entrance to anything, and it was suddenly darker than the inside of your head. Not a ray, not a
mote
, of light was there in that cave ... I had the feeling it was small; no echoes, no water dripping. Just a hole in the ground, perhaps, and not a
real
cave such as we had flushed these creatures out of long ago on Marktwain. Real enough to die in, however had I intended to die. Which I didn’t.

It stretched out, long and lazy and reeking, and laid me down between its paws. And it stretched
them
out, hairy bladed bars on either side of me like a small cage of swords, and it gave me a gentle preliminary swipe with the right one, and batted me back the other way with the left one, to see me roll and hear me whimper

The Thirty-third Formalism was suitable, and I used it fast, doing it rather well if I do say so myself. Lacking gailherb, I used a strip of flesh from the inside of my upper arm to guarantee Conference; lacking any elixir; I used my own blood to mark out the Structural Description and the desired Structural Change. Make do, my Granny Hazelbide always said; and I made do. It smarted. On the other hand, I would of been embarrassed, dying in a place like this at the whim of a creature with five hundred pounds of brawn and maybe four; five ounces of brain. It would not have been fitting.

When the cavecat lay purring quietly, content with the fat white pig it now thought was what it had caught originally (assuming it thought at all), and which I had Substituted for my own skinny white form, I gathered my battered self together and crawled on my stomach back out into what passed in these parts for daylight. I found myself regretting very much that there was no way to do a single Formalism—let alone a Transformation—while being clutched to a cavecat’s bosom. Like a Mule landing, I had needed a
little
space, and I’d gotten mighty beat up before it became available. I was going to have a good night’s work ahead of me cleaning up all this mess, and maybe longer. I looked like something blown through a door with rusty nails in it, and most assuredly my appearance was not anything that would impress the Airys if they could see me now. Or before tomorrow morning, I rather expected.

“Botheration,” I said, and hollered for Sterling one more time. She turned up at once, naturally, now that I didn’t need her to save my life, and looked at me with the most Mulish distaste.

“Don’t like my smell, do you?” I muttered. I didn’t blame her; I didn’t like it either. “Let’s get back to the water,” I said, “and I’ll do something about it.”

I didn’t know the coordinates, or even the general direction, and I was too tired and too weak to SNAP even if I had known them. So I just followed her tail. I could count on her to take me back to where we’d landed, since she wouldn’t be enjoying all these brambles and brush any more than I was. I wanted water; and the medicines in my emergency kit, and the denims I’d been about to put on when this adventure—

I stopped short, right there. I stopped, battered as I was, and the elaborateness with which I blistered the air all around me impressed even Sterling; her ears went flat back against her head.

“And plenty of adventures as you go along. That’s
required!
” she’d said, had dear old Granny Golightly, and I’d ignored her and gone right on talking without so much as an acknowledgment that I’d heard her mention the matter. Nor had I thought of it since. If I hadn’t been so young I’d of thought I was getting old.

This
changed
things.

Sterling brayed at me, and I hushed her.

“Wait a minute now,” I said. “Let me think.”

There were but two possible readings. One, this had been an accident, no more, and my simplest course was to heal my wounds and settle and furbish myself to appear at Castle Airy as if I’d had no hair disturbed on my head since I flew out from Castle Clark.
Two
—this was Granny Golightly’s doing—and she had an amazing confidence in my abilities if it was, or an outright dislike for me—and I should somehow or other contrive to have myself rescued by somebody else ... or whatever. Clear things up just enough to stand it, maybe, throw myself over the Mule’s back at the proper time, and straggle into Castle Airy a victim just short of death.

Foof. I didn’t know what to do. From Granny Golightly’s perspective I’d been getting off easy; two Castles stopped at already, and not one adventure to show for my trouble yet— hardly the way that things were supposed to be laid out. Under the terms of the Constraints set on a Quest, its success was directly proportional to the number and the severity of the adventures encountered along the way, and Golightly might well have felt she had a duty to support me more than I might of cared to be supported. And if Granny’s story explaining my by-passing Castle Smith was a cavecat mauling, and I showed up unmarked and spoiled it—there’d be trouble. But how was I to know?

Un
til Sterling and I made it out onto the bank of the creek again, me fretting all the way and her whuffling, and there, in the absolute middle of nowhere, naked and alone out on a bare gray boulder, sat a pale blue squawker egg. No nest, no squawker, no coop. No farmer. Just the egg. Granny Golightly was mean, but she wasn’t careless; the question was neatly settled, and a few more points to her. I wondered just how far that one’s range extended?

Well, it was dramatic, I’ll say that for it. There I was at the gates of Airy before the eyes of their greeting party, clinging to Sterling’s mane with one poor little gloved hand, my gorgeous velvets sodden with blood and my hair hanging loose below my waist in a tangle of brambles and weeds and dirt. I chose a spot that looked reasonably soft, pulled up the Mule weakly, moaned about a twenty-two-caliber moan, and slid off gracefully onto the ground at their feet in a bedraggled heap. If I’d been watching, I’m sure my heart would of ached for me.

They carried me into the Castle at full speed, shouting for the Grannys (the Twelve Corners help this poor Family, they had
three
of the five Grannys of Oklahomah under their roof), and I allowed a faint “a cavecat ... a huge one ... back there ... “to escape my lips before I surrendered consciousness completely. (Under no circumstances did I intend to undergo the ministrations of three Grannys in any other condition
but
unconsciousness.)

I woke in a high bed in a high room, surrounded by burgundy curtains and hangings and draperies and quilts. The Travellers were addicted to black; with the Airys it was burgundy. And crimson for relief of the eye. There was a plaster on my chest, and another on my right thigh; a bowl of bitter herbs smoked on the wooden chest at the foot of my bed, and the taste in my mouth told me I’d been potioned as well.

I ran my tongue around my teeth, and sighed. Bitter-root and wild adderweed and sawgrass. And wine, of course. Dark red burgundy wine. And something I couldn’t identify and didn’t know that I wanted to. Either none of the Grannys here held with modem notions, or the dominant one didn’t. Phew.

“She’s awake, Mother,” a voice said softly, and I let my eyelids flutter wide and said the obligatory opening lines.

“Where am I? What—what happened to me?”

“You’re in Castle Airy, child,” said a voice—not the same one—”and you’re lucky you’re alive. We would of taken our oaths there were no cavecats left on this continent, but you managed to find one, coming through the Wilderness. Whatever possessed you to
land
in the Wilderness, Responsible of Brightwater? Oklahomah’s got open land in every direction if you needed to stop for a while ... why the Wilderness?”

I had expected that one, and I was ready for it. “My Mule got taken sick all of a sudden,” I said. “I hadn’t any choice.”

Time then for some more obligatories.

I struggled to a sitting position, against the hands of the three Grannys who rushed forward in their burgundy shawls to hold me back, and demanded news on the condition of my beloved steed.

“The creature is just fine, child,” said the strongest one, pushing me back into the pillows with no quarter given. “Not a mark on her. The cat was only interested in you. And I’ll thank you not to flop around like a fish on a hook and undo all the work we’ve done repairing the
effects
of its interest!”

I sighed, but I knew my manners. I said a lengthy piece about my gratitude and my appreciation, and swallowed another potion which differed from the earlier one only in being even nastier; and at last I found myself alone with only the three Grannys and the lady of the Castle and my obligations settled for the time being.

The lady was a widow, her husband killed in a boating accident years ago, which was the only reason the Castle had three Grannys. It was in fact a Castle almost entirely of women; every stray aunt or girlcousin on Oklahomah with poor prospects and not enough gumption to go out as a servant came here to shelter under the broad wings of Grannys Forthright, Flyswift, and Heatherknit. And over them all, the beautiful woman who sat at my side now, smiling down at me, Charity of Guthrie. A three she was, and she lived up to the number; in everything that Charity of Guthrie did, she succeeded, with a kind of careless ease, as if there was nothing to it at all. Her hair fell in two dark brown braids, shot with white, over her shoulders, and her sixty-odd years sat lightly on her as the braids. The Guthrie women wore remarkably well.

“Sweet Responsible,” she said to me, “we are so happy you’re here ... and so sorry that your visit has to be like this! We had a dance planned in your honor tonight, and a hunt breakfast tomorrow morning, and a thing or two more besides; but obviously you must stay right here in this bed, and no commotions. I’ve already sent the word out that you’ll be seeing nobody but us, and that only from where you lie. Poor child!”

The poor child was all worn out, and could see that even with an excessive pride in the skill of her Grannys this woman was not likely to believe her recovered from the attack of that cavecat overnight. Loss of blood. Loss of skin. Shock. Blow on the head. Being dragged along. Whatnot.

Since there was no help for it, I gave up and closed my eyes.

I was going to see to it, one of these days, that Granny Golightly paid dearly for this delay, not to mention all the arithmetic she’d put me through working this out so that all pairs of it came out right
aerodynamically
. Aerodynamicadamnably. Not to mention in addition the potions, which were beyond anything in my personal experience to date.

I slid down into sleep like a snake down a well, surrendering. Tomorrow would be soon enough to try to convince them that someone as young and strong as I was could not be kept down by a cavecat, or even by three Grannys ...

THE WOMEN AT Castle Airy were anything but docile, and I was no match for them. Under ordinary circumstances I might of had at least a fighting chance, but I was not operating under ordinary circumstances; I was being the badly mauled victim of a cavecat attack, and I lost almost two precious days to that role. I would dearly of loved to make up the lost time on the crossing from Oklahomah to Arkansaw, but it would not do. The sea below me was not an open expanse with a rare bird and a rare rocktip to break it; it was the narrow shipping channel between the two continents, and about as deserted as your average small-town street. All up the Oklahomah coast and all the way across the channel I flew, at the regulation sixty-mile-an-hour airspeed for a Mule of Sterling’s quality. It was proper, it was sedate, and it was maddening; it was a number well chosen, being five times a multiple of twelve, and the members of the Twelve Families found it reassuring and appropriate, but it was
not
convenient.

Below me there were at all times not only the ponderous supply freighters, but a crowd of fishing boats, tourboats, private recreation vehicles, and government vessels from a dozen different agencies. Near Arkansaw’s southernmost coast I even saw a small golden ship with three sails of silver a craft permitted only to a Magician of Rank.

It didn’t surprise me. It warmed my heart, for all it made me have to dawdle through the air. We Ozarkers, from the beginning of our history, even before we left Earth, had always had a kind of lust for getting places by water. If an Ozark child could not afford a boat, that child would set anything afloat that it was strong enough to launch—an old log was a particular favorite, and half a dozen planks nailed together into an unreliable raft marked the traditional first step up from log- piloting.

What
was
in some way surprising was that we had bothered with the Mules; it hadn’t been a simple process. When the Twelve Families landed they found the Mules living wild on Marktwain in abundance, but much complicated breeding and fine-tuning had been required before they were brought to a size where a grown man would be willing to straddle one on solid ground, much less
fly
one. And the twelve-passenger tinlizzies we built in the central factory on the edge of Marktwain’s desert were more than adequate for getting people over land distances as needed, as well as solving the problem of what to do with the most plentiful natural substance produced by our goats and pigs.