Ozark Trilogy 1: Twelve Fair Kingdoms (9 page)

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.

But the memories of Earth, Old Earth, were still strong, and we were a loyal, home-loving people. We hadn’t been such fools as to take with us on The Ship the mules of Earth, seeing as how using that limited space for a sterile animal would of been stupid; but every Ozarker had always fancied the elegance of a team of well-trained mules ... and the Mules
were
a good deal like them. Especially in the ears, which mattered, and in the brains, which mattered even more.

We had brought with us cattle and goats and pigs and chickens and a few high-class hounds, but of all that carefully chosen lot only the pigs and goats had survived. Most of the other animals had died during the trip, and the few that made it to landing or were born on Ozark soon sickened, for no reason that anyone could understand, since we humans breathed the air of Ozark and ate its food and drank its water with no ill effects. And then to find the Mules! For all that they stood only four feet tall and had tails that dragged the ground, they looked like something of home, and we had set to breeding them for size, and we braided and looped their tails. And “discovered” that they could fly sixty miles an hour. In the one most essential way of all they differed from their Earth counterparts—they were not sterile.

The people on the boats below me waved, and I waved back, as I wound my way carefully above them, doing my best not to fly directly over any vessel. Sterling was well trained, but there were limits to her tolerance for the niceties, and I wanted no unsavory accidents to spoil the image I was trying so hard to establish.

It was well into afternoon when I began to head down toward the docks that crowded Arkansaw’s southeastern coastline, and there was a chill in the air that made me appreciate my layers of clothing. The docks were crowded, almost jammed with people, some carrying on their ordinary daily business, and some no doubt there to gawk at me, and I decided that a landing would only mean another delay that I could not afford. I chose the largest group of people I could see that appeared to have no obvious reason for being on the docks, and dipped low over them, gripping Sterling hard to impress her with the importance of good behavior: My intention was to fly low enough—but not too low—exchange cheerful greetings in passing as I flew by, and then get on with it. It was a simple enough maneuver something that could be brought off by a middling quality Rent-a-Mule with a seven- year-old child on its back. 1 didn’t want the people down there to think me uppity and standoffish, nor did I want to waste time, so I chose my moment and sailed gracefully down the air toward the waiting Arkansawyers—

And crashed.

Three Castles I’d visited now, without me slightest hint of that disturbance of flight that had made me suspicious in the first place. And now—not over a Wilderness where nothing could suffer but my stomach, not over a stretch of open ocean with the occasional freighter, but twenty feet up from a dockful of sight-seeing women and children—my Mule suddenly wobbled in the air like a squawker chick and smashed into the side of a storage shed on the edge of the dock. The last thought I had as
I
flew, quite independently, off her back, was that at least we hadn’t hurt anybody, though from the screams you’d of thought them all seriously damaged. And then my head and a roof beam made sudden contact, and I stopped thinking about anything atall.