Ozark Trilogy 3: And Then There'll Be Fireworks (17 page)

What they had not taken into account was the strength of the energy that was being lent to Responsible by the Skerrys and the Mules. This was their planet, too, and had been theirs many thousands of years before ever an Ozarker set foot on it, and they had no desire to see it fall to the Garnet Ring, with who knew what consequences to follow. They didn’t know a great deal about the peoples of the Garnet Ring, but they knew enough to be sure they weren’t anybody you’d want for neighbors, and never mind the details.

Responsible of Brightwater gave her sister and Silverweb one look of considerable irritation, drew on the more than ample reservoir of energy the Mules and the Skerrys were offering her, and before the other two women could so much as draw a breath she had SNAPPED the three of them back to her own bedroom at Castle Brightwater, leaving Sterling to bring the wagon home.

Sitting on the edge of her bed, where she’d lain so long silent and motionless, she clucked her tongue, and glared at Troublesome and Silverweb, both of them more than slightly startled by their unaccustomed mode of transportation.

“This won’t do,” announced Responsible. “This won’t do atall. Let me get something on my bones besides my skin, and I’ll see to it.”

And she headed for her wardrobe with her hands already busy braiding her hair, pausing only the few seconds it took to advise Troublesome that she’d never
seen
anybody quite so grubby and it would be a good thing if she had a tidy-up before she forgot how the parts of a decent female were supposed to be arranged.

“My lady—I am afraid.”

The words came from an unusual source; Jessica of Lewis, Teacher Jessica these past seven months, was in the usual run of things a tower of strength. She was a true Three: brilliant, creative, high-spirited, and one for whom everything seemed to come easily. She had slipped into the Teaching Order as a hand slips into a glove made to its measure. None of the usual kicking at the traces for Jessica of Lewis. Not a flicker when her beloved books— “
Real
books!” the others had whispered. “Not micros,
real
books. And three of them!” —had been taken from her and added to the community library in Castle Wommack’s north wing. When all the rest were down, it was Teacher Jessica they relied on, to bring their spirits up and to remind them once again that for those that are vowed to poverty that experience of poverty is no hardship.

Now she sat in Faculty Meeting, fifth down from Teacher Jewel of Wommack, so fast had she ascended through the ranks, and said: “My lady, I am afraid.”

“We are all afraid,” Teacher Jewel responded. “Not to be afraid would show a lack of common sense, or an unhealthy detachment from reality. There is a group consensus; nowhere in that consensus is there space for the crystal suspended above this Castle. How could we
not
be afraid?”

“That bodacious great rock hanging over our heads and ready for to drip down blood, it looks like ... Law! Teacher Jessica, I should
hope
we’re afraid!”

“If it is a rock,” said Jewel of Wommack carefully, giving the new Teacher Candidate a measuring look, “what is holding it where it is, Cousin Naomi? Rocks do not float, neither do they fly. And there is no more magic.”

Naomi of Wommack met her kinswoman’s eyes without flinching; a good sign, thought Jewel. Naomi’s speech was rougher than any Candidate’s they had accepted yet; one would have thought she was trying for the formspeech used by the Grannys, except that even the Grannys no longer said “for to” before their verbs ... perhaps in a moment of great excitement one might, but Jewel could not recall an example. Naomi had come out of a pocket on the far side of the Wilderness Lands of Kintucky, from a cluster of six households so isolated they had not had comsets even before Responsible of Brightwater was struck down. The rest of Kintucky had not even known they were there, and given the possibilities of marriage open to them they would not have lasted long—it was good fortune a Teacher, canvassing the Wilderness on her Mule, had stumbled across them.

“There will be again,” said Naomi, confident as a child. “As there do be star and sun and tree. Somehow it’s got a hitch in it, it’s a kind of drought as comes in a bad year for the rains, but no reason for to doubt.
I
don’t doubt.”

Jewel of Wommack believed her; she was as transparent as thin new ice on a puddle. And—always provided they all lived through whatever this crisis was—Naomi’s ways might require more polishing than the other Candidates’ had.
May
be. Jewel had discussed it when Naomi of Wommack joined them, and there had been disagreement among the senior faculty.

“She will be going back to Teach in the Wilderness Lands and along their borders,” Jewel had reminded them. “Might could be that if her speech and her manners are greatly changed they won’t trust her there, and trust is the foundation of Teaching. Think of my brother—when he took up the speechmode of the Magicians of Rank, purely to spite them, and then kept it up purely to spite the
rest
of us—think how it changed the way people behaved around him. He has a good deal more difficulty coaxing the young women into the haymows than he had when he spoke like anybody else ... and a very good thing that is, I might add.”

“But how, my lady,” the others had protested, letting the matter of Lewis Motley drop, “how can she be respected if she speaks like she does, and drinks her coffee out of her saucer?”

Jewel’s eyes, always dark blue, had gone even darker, and she had rebuked them sharply, reminding them for what seemed to her the ten thousandth time that it was
presence
that inspired respect, not fine manners and flowery speech.

“Do you ever look at your Teachers’ Manuals?” she had asked them, exasperated. “It’s set down there for you clearly enough, if you’d only look!”

It was among the Rules Major.

The essence of inspiring belief is to achieve congruence, so that the channel of the voice and the channel of the body are in every smallest feature in true harmony.

And the codicil:

And it would be well if the channel of the heart could be harmonious as well, providing always for the protection of the innocent.

That is ... if you knew too much, keep it to yourself, and never mind the congruence of the heart, which was why it went in a codicil.

Candidate Naomi of Wommack met that congruence requirement to perfection. Her words were rough, her features were rough, her manners were rough, her movements were rough. She strode when she walked, she leaped up when she stood, she collapsed in a heap when she sat ...

“It is congruence.” Teacher Jewel had said, ending the discussion. “It may be of great value. I know no requirement that Teachers must be like dolls, all matched the way the Grannys are. I may in fact go back to an easier way of speaking my own self; I was more comfortable that way.”

A voice in the back of her head had said sadly:
No, you will not
. And she had known it was true. Senior Teacher of the Order, and not yet sixteen, she needed every mark of authority she could get, including the elegant speechmode—not quite his own, but elegant nonetheless—in which Lewis Motley Wommack had drilled her till she wept. He had been quite right.

“My lady?”

Jewel was wrenched from her reverie, and embarrassed that she’d been able to fall into it, considering the circumstances.

“I apologize,” she said distractedly. “My mind was somewhere ... in a pleasanter time.”

“We are wondering,” said the speaker, a young Teacher whose voice had the granite edge fright gives when held back on tight rein, “if we should go on with the lessons today. We are afraid ... the children are even more so.”

“And what are the children doing at this moment, Teacher Cristabel?” Jewel asked her. “Do you know?”

“Huddled around their parents, sitting in their laps and being rocked if they’re little enough, cowering under beds and porches ... anything to get out of sight of that ... thing. Whatever it is.”

“In that case,” said Jewel of Wommack resolutely, “we will of course go on with lessons. And the quicker the better. The most helpful thing we could do would be to present those children with that idea that there is order in their days
despite
that unholy object, and that it hasn’t the power to make the grownups set aside the usual daily routine.”

One of her faculty had a thought that had been thick on the far side of the world, in Airy Kingdom.

‘They are all about to die,” she said. “Better they die together than apart.”

Jewel felt a rage that would be no help here, and she put it aside to be dealt with another time, and set her questions.

“Teacher Cecilia,” she asked, “how is it that you know they, or any of us, are about to die?”

“My lady!”

“Well? If you have information, speak up; and if you have none, hold your peace. Has that crystal done any one of us, or any thing, injury?”

“Not yet, my lady.”

“Not yet! But it will, eh? It does not fit the group consensus, will not be poked or shoved into the model we have built and labeled HERE SITS THE REAL WORLD ... and
therefore
, it has to be a source of death.”

“But my lady— “

“Per
haps
,” said Jewel icily, “might could be the time has come for a change in that model. Had you thought of that? It is unknown; one fears the unknown. No doubt the first rainbow ever to be seen in the sky had people running and squalling, too.”

Teacher Candidate Naomi was fascinated. Jewel could tell, and before she could call out something disgraceful, the Senior Teacher moved smoothly on into her next sentence.

“Until such time as we have evidence that that thing is a danger, we will behave normally,” she instructed them. “That is our duty.”

The Teachers and the Candidates nodded, though some did it reluctantly. They could see the rightness of what she said, and hoped those Teachers out riding their circuits or in residence in small towns beyond reach of the Castle would see it as well. The sight of the Teachers at their posts presenting history and grammar and mathematics and ecology and music theory to the children, as they did on any other day, would go a long way toward calming any panic. Business as usual, that was what was needed.

Lewis Motley Wommack the 33
^rd
must have thought so, too. He came into the room in a fury, demanding to know why they weren’t already on their way to their classes.

Jewel’s voice sliced the air like a whip: “When
I
say that they are to go to their classes, they will go—and not until!”

The other women dropped their eyes and folded their hands; except for Naomi, who would not for anything have missed a single detail of the confrontation between brother and sister.

“Jewel, I do not mean to interfere— “ the young man began.

“Then don’t. Go on about your business ... if you have any business ... and leave us to ours. You have nothing to contribute here, and we have no time to coddle you.”

I will never stop paying,
thought Lewis Motley;
never. She wanted a home, and a man’s body beside hers at night, and babes in her arms, and tadlings playing round her that looked just like that man; that’s all she ever wanted. And I gave her this instead.

It had been necessary, he was still convinced of that. Without the comsets, cut off from the rest of the continents, the people of Kintucky would have been condemned to ignorance and superstition; the Teachers had been absolutely necessary. But she was not going to forgive him.

And there’d been the matter of Responsible of Brightwater ... that had
not
been necessary.

He gave her a stiff and formal nod, longing for the days when she’d worshiped the ground he walked on and the air he breathed. He wondered sometimes if he would ever love anything or anyone as he loved his little sister. He hoped not.

“I beg your pardon,” said the former Guardian of Castle Wommack, and closed the door quietly behind him as he made his exit.

“Now then,” said Jewel—and they all understood; the incident had not happened— “the only question is what you are to tell the children. And we must decide quickly, because you should be in your classrooms in ten minutes, and well prepared. Suggestions, please.”

Teacher Sharon of Airy, second in rank to Jewel herself, spoke first.

“Do we
know
anything?”

“Nothing,” said Jewel. “It was not there; it appeared out of nowhere and it was there; it remains there. It grows darker in color, and the Castle throbs with the vibration it is emitting. That is all.”

“We cannot tell the children that!”

“Why not? It is the truth.”

The protests came from every one of the seventeen who sat around the table, except Naomi of Wommack.

“Dozens,” said Naomi. “What point is there making up tales and pretty lies? Reckon any tadling smart enough to do his three-times is going to see we’re lying—they do, you know. You can’t lie to tadlings. Best they see we know what they know and
howsomever
, pointy rock or no pointy rock, we’re there for to teach same as always.
Un
less one of youall has an explanation to offer ‘em as will pass for truth.”