Ozark Trilogy 1: Twelve Fair Kingdoms (19 page)

“Tell me, then,” I said. “I will listen until you have told me everything that disturbs you; and I will not interrupt.”

And she began to talk, in the faintly foreign archaic Panglish the First Granny had taught her people, and that I had learned from many boring hours listening to the microtapes while I begged to be let go out and play instead. I blessed every one of those hours now, seeing as I understood her with ease, and I supposed she’d spent fully as many hours herself listening to the Teachers of her people, who passed down the knowledge of Panglish without benefit of tapes or any other thing but their wondrous memories and their supple throats.

There was trouble, she told me. Much trouble on Arkansaw, where the Guthries and the Parsons were even more openly feuding than had been admitted to me, by her account. Where me Purdys were frantic, trying desperately to play both sides of me feud, but faced with an eventual choice made under great pressure. There were, she told me, strange comings and goings in the nights.

“There was a meeting in what you choose to call the Wilderness Lands of Arkansaw,” she said, “not three nights ago. The men there were not all of Arkansaw, some had come very far ... some wore the crests of Kintucky and Tinaseeh, the Families known as Wommack and Traveller. It went on all the night long—our children had no sleep—and then, as
thieves
comport themselves, all stole away at first light. A Gentle does not spy, I remind you; thus, I cannot tell you what they spoke of. What we heard we heard only because a loud voice in the night carries far in an ill-mannered throat ... but they were not telling each other pleasant tales to while away the hours. That much was clear.”

She stopped for a moment, and I waited, and then she went on.

“It was sworn, Responsible of Brightwater; sworn and sealed—the Gentles were to be left alone. And none of your magic was to touch our people, for all of time. Nor were we ever to be part of your ... feuding. If you have forgotten, I am here to remind you—so
read
the treaties.”

I let my breath out, slowly, wondering where in me the knowledge was that I supposedly could put to use in circumstances such as these. I felt no revelations bubbling within me, no sealed-off memories with their locks dropping away.

“Has a hand been raised against you?” I asked T’an K’ib. “Any hand? Any weapon?”

“Not as of this night.”

“Has any sharp word been spoken? Any threat made? Has any Ozarker actually breached the privacy of your homes, T’an K’ib?”

“Not as of this night.”

“None?”

“You must understand,” she said, no edge to her voice, but firm, “that what
you
consider a hand raised, or a sharp word, or privacy breached, may not be the same as what a Gentle would so judge. There are many, many thousands of us in the caves of the Wilderness Lands of Ozark, daughter of Brightwater; and we live in peace, and our lives are not tainted by sorcery. We have made adjustments unasked, when the mines of your people cut well beyond the limits given them, and we have not begrudged those adjustments, though no law held us to them.”

I could imagine, thinking of the Parsons and Guthries and Purdys, always wanting to cut just a little deeper into a vein, probably shaking the Gentles in their sleep and filling their homes with gemdust, or worse. And I was ashamed.

“When I return to Castle Brightwater,” I said, my voice harsh in my throat, “I will see that that is put right.
That
I can do. There will be no more encroachments on your territory, and where such has taken place, your ‘adjustments’ will be readjusted. My word on it, and my apologies.”

She made an easy gesture with her head, as if to show how little this mattered; I, the Ozarker, felt bigger and greedier, as I was no doubt meant to feel.

“If it can be done, so be it,” she said, “if not—what is past is past. But if the three Families of the continent of Arkansaw go to open war among themselves, and if the Families of Kintucky and Tinaseeh join them, blood will flow in the Wildernesses and it may well be
our
blood. That we cannot allow, daughter of Brightwater.
That
would be in violation of
all
treaties.”

“War, T’an K’ib? Your people fear
war?
”

I suppose I sounded foolish; she sounded indulgent.

“It is not an exotic word,” she said. “Think of guns and lasers and bombs and gases and missiles. All very small and simple Panglish words, and well known to you.”

“Dear friend, dear T’an K’ib,” I protested, “Ozarkers do not go to war—it was the violence of one human hand raised against another much of it part of war and much of it without any explanation but madness, that drove us here in The Ship one thousand years ago. As a Gentle does not lie, T’an K’ib— an Ozarker does not
war
.”

“You yourself,” she pointed out, “have let pass the word ‘feud’ without protest. Our Teachers are quite clear on me meaning of that word, and it is violent.”

“Ah, T’an K’ib,” I said, almost weak with relief, “it is not what it appears to be atall. This is a misunderstanding.”

“Explain, please.”

“You know of the Confederation of Continents of Ozark?”

“Your government,” she said flatly.

“As much government as we have,” I said, “and hard won. We are at a tricky
political
crossroads, we of the Confederation. And the Families you name, the ones that have so disgracefully disturbed the harmony of your homes, they are not plotting violence. They are plotting against the Confederation ... they are plotting the casting of
votes
, not the launching of missiles! Nothing more. T’an K’ib; nothing less. There is not even a question of dominance among them.”

“That makes no sense,” she said. “I beg your pardon if I speak sharply, but it makes no sense.”

“If.” I said, “one thinks carefully of the Ozarkers—and no reason, the Twelve Corners granted, why your people should ever do anything of the kind—it does make sense. And no offense taken. First, no Ozarker lifts a hand against another, not since we left Earth; the only exception would be the occasional child, that must be taught it can’t hit its playmate because there’s a toy they both want at the same time, and the occasional drunken fool, that is promptly seen to and differs little from the child. I’d hazard that even among
your
people the young and foolish must learn.”

“Granted,” she said.

“But what the dissenting Families want is not that one should be superior to the rest, but that all should be equal, and
no
dominance. What they want, T’an K’ib, is isolation.”

“It is an absurdity.”

“No doubt,” I said reluctantly, my loyalty giving me a bit of trouble around the edges. “Nevertheless—it is so.”

“There must be community,” she said, “and this is a small planet. What you describe is anarchy.”

I was reminded, a moment only, of Sharon of Clark ... but there was a difference. This was no child who faced me, prattling memorized cant from Granny School. This was a diplomat, high in the ranks of a people whose sophistication surpassed ours as Granny Gableframe’s surpassed a babe’s. She knew quite well what anarchy was, and she knew what went with it. No doubt her people had seen its effects a time or two in their long history. No doubt it meant, to her and to them, rape and pillage and murder, barbarian hordes pouring through the cavehomes and tearing out the ancient tunnels as they went. She had no reason to believe an Ozarker ungoverned would behave any differently.

“They want to go back to boones.” I said, wishing sadly that there was some way to make her understand us—us aliens.

“It is not a concept that I know,” said T’ah K’ib, “The Teachers do not mention it.”

“Nor is it a concept that will burden you unduly,” I told her.

“A very long time ago—by Earth reckoning—on the planet from which my people came, there was a man whose name was Daniel Boone. If he had a middle name, we have no record of it—I’m sorry. And it is written that whenever the time came that Daniel Boone could see the smoke of a neighbor’s chimney from his own homeplace, those neighbors were too near, and he moved on.”

The Gentles lived in chambers carved beneath the earth, and it was said that they observed a stringent privacy of manner. But they lived crowded close as twin babes in a womb, and their families were not small. I doubted she would see much sense to the story of Daniel Boone.

She was silent and small, sitting there thinking over what I had said, and possessed of a kind of presence that much larger creatures might have envied. I wished that we could have been friends. I wished that I could have visited
her
—but the Gentles saw to it that none but a very small Ozarker child could enter the doors they set up. I would never know, unless I looked in a way that the treaties forbid me, what it was like inside the caves of the Gentles. And, I reminded myself sternly, it was none of my business to know.

“Responsible of Brightwater?” she asked, finally.

“Yes, dear friend?”

“It may be that what you say is true, though it does not seem reasonable.”

“To the best of my knowledge, it is true, however it sounds. And I believe my knowledge on
this
matter is reliable.”

“I see ... I
think
I see.”

I thought she would leave me then, but she sat quietly, not even a shape any longer since the moonlight had waned. Evidently whatever this was, it was not over.

“Friend T’an K’ib,” I hazarded, “do you want something else of me? You have only to ask.”

“Your guarantee.”

“Of no war? Consider it given. Of an end to mining beneath your bedchambers and your streets? Of course, I guarantee it; that it ever happened was due only to carelessness, not to malice. When I speak to the Families guilty of that, they will be deeply ashamed.”

“No,” she said. She shook her head, and I heard the crystals in her ears sound, softly. Little bells in the darkness. “That is not all.”

“What, then?”

“
Whatever
it is that your people are about,” she said, “however it may be, whether this desire to be a boons that you describe to me, or a feud, or a greater evil ... Your guarantee, daughter of Brightwater, that we Gentles will take
no part
in any of it! No part, however small! Not even by accident ... as you say, by carelessness.”

Well, I never liked lying. I liked lying to a Gentle even less than I liked ordinary lying, since they did not lie, they were as vulnerable to it as they would have been to the kick of a boot. More so; the kick they could at least have seen coming. However, there are times when a person does what she must. I gave her her guarantee, all solemn and sealed and packaged in phrases that made me feel silly even to use them, and she went away as unheralded as she had come, leaving me to toss fretfully through the rest of that night. My conscience was raw in me.

What I hadn’t dared tell her was that there was only one way that I could make my guarantees real. What her myths said I had in the way of power I did not know; her people had royalty, and perhaps the ancient rights that went with that. I had none.

I could do what she asked of me, yes. But only in one way. Only by setting wards of the strongest (and from her point of view, the foulest and most barbaric) magic known to me, around every cave and every burrow and every smallest scrap of Wilderness her people inhabited. It was a flagrant violation of the treaties she had mentioned with every other breath; it was also the only way that what had to be done
could
be done. And at that it would have to wait till I was back at Castle Brightwater and had all my laboratories and my Magicians at my disposal—and I had not told her that, either I supposed she would tell her people there was to be no delay.

I knew perfectly well that she would rather have died, and all her kin with her, than be protected by the magic they so abhorred—by “sorceries.” For sure, it would
not
be judged
dyst’al
. And I did not intend to be the person that shattered illusions that had lasted tens of thousands of years, or the person that ended up with the lives of such a people and their Mood on her hands. It might be there was some other way out something I should have thought of, but it did not come to my mind, and I was colder than I had ever been in my life; and I gathered what little of my wits I had left about me. And I lied

CASTLE WOMMACK sat high at the northwest comer of Kintucky, in a landscape of tangled trees and thick ground cover; steep hills and ragged cliffs and crags; only Tinaseeh was wilder, and not by much. The Castle was bigger than it needed to be, rambling along the edge of a bluff above a ravine at the bottom of which there surely flowed a river; though I couldn’t see it from the air. I would of guessed it to be at least twice the size of Castle Brightwater; and larger than any castle on Arkansaw, the Parsons’ included. And I could understand why, though I might privately question the use of so much time and energy for a single structure. The natural stone it was built of was abundant—if they hadn’t used it to build the Castle they’d of had to cart the stuff away and fill up ravines with it, after all. Every time I flew low to get a look at the land I saw stretches where boulders big as squawker coops were strewn around like so much carelessly flung salt, leaving the vegetation to grow over and around and in between the jutting stones as best it could ... and I was not looking at the Wilderness Lands, mind you. This was the “cleared” area of Kintucky.