Ozark Trilogy 3: And Then There'll Be Fireworks (8 page)

They were not discussing the possibility of bringing into this war the cruel and efficient lasers, of which every Arkansaw Family had a plentiful supply, used to shape Tinaseeh ironwood and work Arkansaw mines and quite capable of cutting a man into strips no thicker than a sheet of pliofilm. They were not yet reduced to considering such measures, unlike the Parsons, for they had one hole card left to them still. They were discussing the question of whether a Guthrie ship might be put to use.

“We only have men enough left to send one medium sized ship, maybe a Class C freighter,” Michael Stepforth was saying, “but one is all we ought to need, and a Class C quite big enough. We send it in to Brightwater Landing, we take the Castle, we get ourselves a computer and a comset transmitter and three or four technicians that know how to assemble and run those, grab whatever they tell us we have to have in the way of equipment—and back we come. Why not?”

“You think Brightwater’d let us get away with that?” demanded Myrrh of Guthrie. “It’s a far sight from being what I’d call a
secret
operation.”

“We don’t have any reason to believe Brightwater even knows there
is
war on Arkansaw,” said her husband. He gave the high stone hearth an irritated kick with the toe of his boot, and then did it again for good measure. “For all they know, we’re fat and prosperous over here, living peacefully and respectably, sitting round the tables tossing off strawberry wine and reminiscing about the olden days.”

“Goatflop,” pronounced Granny Stillmeadow. Elegance had never been her strong suit. “I suppose they think snow doesn’t fall here, nor diphtheria touch the babies, nor rivers ever go to flood, nor any
other
such ordinary human catastrophes. I suppose they think we Arkansawyers are immune to all such truck. Goatflop!”

“All right,” said the King, “I’ll grant you that’s not reasonable. I’ll grant you that wasn’t the brightest speech I ever made.”

“That’s mighty becoming of you,” snorted the Granny. “Seeing as how it was beyond question the
stupidest
speech you ever made, and not for lack of other examples to choose from.”

“Granny Stillmeadow,” said the man, “you can granny at me all you like, and no doubt I deserve it. But it still holds that they have no reason, none whatsoever, to be suspicious of one of our ships at their Landing. If they think we’re starving over here, they’ll be just that more likely to think we’ve come to beg for food, and I say
let
them—just so as we get inside the Castle.”

They thought about that a while. It was true, there’d been no communication between the other continents and Arkansaw—it was barely possible that, with the comsets out and the Mules not flying, the war on Arkansaw was as much a secret to the Brightwaters as conditions on Kintucky were to the Families of Arkansaw. It was not something you could test, one way or the other. The war took up so much of
their
minds that there was a sneaking tendency to consider it the major preoccupation of everyone else on Ozark as well ... but that was clearly foolish. Childish. Might could be everybody knew, and what they thought of it would not be anything to pleasure the ear. And might could be nobody knew except the sorry citizens of Mizzurah, that had suffered its effects directly. There was no way of knowing.

And it was true that nobody but Brightwater and Guthrie had had ships of a size adequate for ocean transport, and Guthrie still had its ships; putting one of them to use was something open to them, however much it might strain the last fragments of their supplies and energies.

“Think, Granny Stillmeadow,” said Michael Stepforth Guthrie. “Think what it would mean, if it worked.”

“With computers, and computer technicians to run them, we’d have just enough of an edge,” put in one of the sons. “Just enough to turn things around, Granny.”

Yes. They would be able to offer the remnants of the population of Arkansaw quite a few things, if they had the computers. And
do
to them quite a few things, if they seemed reluctant to accept the benefits offered.

“It’s everything wagered on one throw,” said Granny Stillmeadow, “I remind you of that. We might send a ship once; we might get into the Castle once ... but there’s only the once. And I remind you that even that piddling chance is a matter of pure ignorant luck, no more! We’ve not so much as a Housekeeping Spell to set behind it as a prop-up, don’t you forget that!”

“So? Our luck is not as good as anybody else’s?”

The Granny made a noise like a Mule whuffling, and brought her knitting needles to a full stop, and stared at him in a mixture of contempt and disbelief that had an eloquence words would be hard put to it to match.

“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.”