Opening Day dragged on, and Responsible dragged on through it, up in the balcony. The breeze through the windows of the Independence Room was heavy with the smell of early summer flowers, and the soft hum of the red Ozark bees on whose ministrations those flowers depended, and the combination was an effective sedative. Nothing that was going on inside did anything to lessen its effectiveness, either. She supposed she must have heard worse speeches and more boring ones, somewhere, sometime, but she could not during that interminable day think of an example. If the overdose of tedium didn’t take any of the starch out of the Traveller delegation, it could only be due to their bizarre practice of spending all of every Sundy listening to a single extended sermon, with elaborate developments and codas and commentaries and extrapolations, and emendations on the extrapolations, and scattering slightly truncated versions of the same throughout the rest of the week. They were calloused to this kind of thing, both ears and rears, and could of endured a lot more of it, she supposed. Everyone else, however, including their allies the Farsons and the Guthries, was exhausted long before the Closing Prayer. The way some of the delegates had slumped down in their seats by midafternoon had all twenty-seven Grannys still presentand for sure still straight as spikes in their seats-clicking their tongues fit to drown out their knitting needles.
Responsible was satisfied with the effect. She much doubted that the population had stayed glued to the comsets to watch the proceedings of this day, and she figured to of lost the majority of them well before noon. She doubted even more that they’d tune in their sets to more of the same tomorrow, and that suited her purposes. If there was going to be a battle on the floor of the Independence Room, the fewer Ozarkers that knew about it and had time to get excited about it, the better. And she had seen to it that there were plenty of other ways to spend your time than sit at the comsets, or even in the balcony, while the days of the Grand Jubilee went passing by.
There were four different plays-one religious, one historical, one comedy, one adventure-going on in Capital City at all times, and enough different ones in their repertoires to be sure there’d be no repetition. Three dance troupes were on duty, two indoors and the other moving around the city, and ordered to make themselves available anywhere they were asked. Four sports exhibitions, including one laid on especially for the tadlings. Checkers tournaments everywhere she had a leftover corner. Two speech competitions, tours through the caves for the romantic of mind and tours through the farms for the practical. Mule races for the daring, and all-day nonstop sermons for the conservative. Down at the Landing there was an inexhaustible picnic, where you could sit and eat in comfort, passing your time in gossip and watching the ships come and go in the harbor. Outside the city borders the largest fair ever put on anywhere would be going on all five days, with every kind of game and exhibit and performance, every variety of food and drink, rides all the way from the sedatest of merry-gorounds to a thing called Circle-Of-Screams that was guaranteed to make you get off and sit down for half an hour to review your sins. She had something for everybody, something for every time, and comcrews everywhere to beam out the doings to those that couldn’t come to Brightwater. The doldrums on the channel given over to the Confederation Hall assembly were not going to be able to compete for attention.
There’d been plenty of opposition to the scope of the celebration, even from her grandfather, Jonathan Cardwell Brightwater the 12th, who didn’t as a rule care what anybody spent, so long as they extended him the same privilege.
“Are you sure all that’s needful, Responsible?”
She’d heard that till the time came when she suggested they get a sign made and save their throats. And she’d ignored it. Yes, it was needful, and furthermore it was the one and the only Jubilee she expected ever to be involved in; she’d not have it said that Brightwater stinted, or offered its guests anything less than the very best there was to offer.
“Pride, missy!” the Granny had said, shaking her finger. “Just pure pride! And where do you reckon it’ll lead you, one of these days?”
She took a deep breath, remembering, and then, finally, the Reverend said “Amen!” and it was over, and the delegations began to file out of the Hall. The band in the bandstand at the corner of the lawn struck up a rousing march at the sight of the first man stiff and blinking at the light and the air, and that did get them moving a bit more briskly. The Grannys and Responsible brought up the rear, everybody else having left the balcony hours before, and she made certain that the Grannys surrounded her on all sides. Invisibility was her goal, and she achieved it clear to the gates of Castle Brightwater and across the courtyard to the open front doors, where the Grannys scattered and forced her to hurry for cover. A narrow cramped corridor that ran the length of the Castle and was meant to give the staff a speedy way in or out of any of the rooms had served both her and her sister Troublesome well when they were children; it served her admirably now.
Nevertheless, when she finally reached her room on the third floor, she found that all her painstaking precautions had been a waste. She could of come straight up the front way and saved herself fifteen minutes of walking time, and had a herald before her crying, “Make way for Responsible of Brightwater!”-it wouldn’t of made any difference.
Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd was waiting for her, sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up and his arms clasped around them, leaning back comfortably with his head against the wall beside her bedroom door.
“Oh, law,” she said, “wherever did you come from?”
“Afternoon, Responsible of Brightwater. Same place you didthat repository of hot wind and tiny minds we choose to call Confederation Hall.”
She ignored that, and said, “Good afternoon, Lewis Motley Wommack, and you’ll miss your supper if you don’t hurry. The delegates are intended for the first serving in the Great Hall . . . you want to end up eating with the children?”
He cocked his head and raised his eyebrows at her, and looked her up and down, and she took one step backward before she caught herself.
“You ran away from me once,” he said solemnly.
“So I did.”
“You plan to repeat that?”
“If I do, you’ll no doubt notice,” she snapped.
He smiled and leaned his head back. again and closed his eyes; it was clear he’d no intention of moving from her door. She could, of course, have. had him, removed-or removed him herself, if the commotion either would cause had seemed justified. It would of been an interesting problem of manners if it had not concerned her quite so personally.
It is called a Time Corner, Granny Hazelbide had said, holding her tight between knees so bony they hurt her even then, in front of all the other five-year-olds, and we cannot see around it. Could she run away from a Time Comer twice?
And then there was the question of what, precisely, he knew. He had glanced at her when she sat exhausted on a bench in his Castle hall, and for sure, just as the Prophecy had said, he had known her and she had known him, in same way that she could not account for. But had some Tutor told him, years ago, that the day would come when there’d be hard times for the entire population of Ozark on account of his behavior with Responsible of Brightwater, and hers with him? No matter what she did, said the Prophecy, there’d be hard times-but nowhere did it say there was a way of escaping. It might could be that he sat there now, insolent by her door as if he’d been near kin, because he too had been told that what lay before them was not to be avoided, and he wanted to get it over with and put it behind him. And it might could be he knew nothing at all, that no gossip from those little girls had found its way to Castle Wommack over those eight years, and that he sat there for reasons he understood not at a11.
“Lewis Motley Wommack,” she said, watching him closely, “why are you here on my doorsill?”
“To see Responsible of Brightwater,” he answered, perfectly easy. “I’ve come for audience.”
“Audiences,” she said carefully, “are held with queens and kings. We’ve no such nonsense here, young Wommack.”
He opened his eyes then and looked at her, and Responsible turned her own eyes swiftly away and stared at the floorboards of the corridor, that were polished and gleaming for the Jubilee till she could see a dim reflection of herself staring back at her. She was in no hurry to look at him directly; one look into those eyes of his and the world had swung away from beneath her, once before. In the seconds it had lasted she had fallen endlessly, before she had managed to break free and run.
“You are a kind of royalty,” he said, and she could feel his smile like sunlight on her flesh. “I don’t know what kind, nor does anybody else-but I mean to find out.”
“You talk rubbish,” she said.
“And you tell lies-and we’re even. Look at me, Responsible of Brightwater, her that travels round the Castles on Solemn Quest, with boots of scarlet leather and whip and spurs of silver . . . her that can command a Magician of Rank as easily as I command an Attendant-oh, yes, my fine young lady, we do hear these things, and the servingmaids will talk, for all you caution them . . . Look at me!”
Because she had the feeling that escape, if escape there might be, or perhaps the mercy of delay, lay specifically in not looking, she shook her head like a stubborn child ordered to recite, and stared unrelenting at the floor. And that was her undoing. You can’t keep a wary eye on a serpent unless you watch him, and his hands were gripping her shoulders before she knew he’d moved.
“I tell you,” he said in a voice that held the promise of endless patience, “look at me! Am I so ugly as all that? So terrible I’ll turn your face to stone?”
She struggled in his hands and turned her head away, and with no trouble at all he used one of those hands to hold her fast and the other to tilt her face up. She could feel the warmth radiating from him where he stood, not half an inch between her body and his, and she put all her strength into pulling away from him, with her eyes tight shut.
“Responsible of Brightvvater,” he scoffed, “I expect you were not Properly Named. Poor little girlbaby, your Granny clabbered the thing. Timorous of Brightwater, that’s more like it. Cowardice of Brightwater, might could be. My little sister has more courage than you.”
That bothered her not at all. She’d been hearing nonsense intended to provoke her to foolishness all her life, and except for that single mistake with Granny Leeward, none of it had succeeded in a very long time. What she’d heard from all around her lately made his taunting no more than prattle. But his physical strength was a different matter. There was no legal way she could break loose from his grip, short of screaming for help like a terrified child--and nothing would of brought her to such a shameful pass.
There was no help for it. And once her mind was settled to that, she wasted no more time. She opened her eyes and looked at him.
No one would have called him handsome, but he was wondrously beautiful. His head was thick with curls of coppery Wommack hair, copper with lights and fire in it, and she knew from the look of his wrists and throat that naked he would gleam in the light with that copper everywhere. He had the beauty gnarled trees and rough cliff faces have, with no elegance to him anywhere -except for his eyes. They were blue, like any Wommack eyes, but a blue so dark that it put her in mind of the violets that grew deep in Brightwater’s forests in the last days of March and were so useful for simple Spells. The eyes had great elegance, and an utter authority, and they were as dangerous as she had remembered; she looked full into them, mustering her courage, and once again the floor dropped from beneath her feet and she was helpless.
“Come into my room,” she said to him, in a voice she had no mastery of and hardly recognized, suspended in endless blue. It was, she decided, like being trapped in glass-blue stained glass. She had a sudden image of herself in a pointed church window, marked off all around with a leading of black, and perhaps a Mule beside her and a squawker above her head, and cleared her throat quickly. Laughter would not be appropriate, however much it might tempt her.
“You’re not afraid for your reputation?”
“I have no reputation,” she told him. And that was so. Everything had been said of her, and much of it was true. “Are you afraid for yours? Or have you forgotten how doors work?”
He rubbed at his nose with the hand that wasn’t occupied in holding her, but he made no move to touch her door.
“It’s warded,” he said.
Responsible gathered together enough of her attention to sniff the air, and to set aside the smell of him that flooded her senses, and was amazed that she’d not noticed the garlic sooner. Granny Hazelbide had been by here, and would no doubt have hung garlic wreaths round Responsible’s neck if she’d dared.
“My doors,” she told him, “are always warded, one way or another, and always will be. Make up your mind, Lewis Motley Wommack--you have waited all. this time here at my door, and played a foolish child’s game of Look Into My Eyes with me, and now I am going through that door. Do you follow me or not?” And she added, “Mind, I’m not running from you. You’re free to keep me company.”
Once they were inside he sat in the rocker by her window that Granny Hazelbide had chosen the night before, and she took another and pulled it over facing him.
“Well,” she asked, “you suffer any ill effects from the wards?” He looked himself over, and he took his time about it, and then he allowed that there seemed to be no change.
“I haven’t been turned into any kind of varmint, there’s that,” he said. “Nor struck dead, nor my wits scrambled. There’s that.”
“Did you expect such stuff?” she marveled. “Wards are to keep evil out, not create it! What kind of Tutor did you have, there at Castle Wommack, that he didn’t teach you even that?”
“You are highly valued, daughter of Brightwater,” he answered, “though it’s not considered polite to mention it. Very highly valued indeed. I’ve heard that song”-he sang the chorus in a pleasant enough voice that would one day be deep--
“What did you learn as you flew out so fine,
Splendid on Muleback, dressed like a queen?
What did you learn, daughter of Brightwater?
Tell us the wonderful things that you’ve seen!”
“All the way to Kintucky,” she said, wondering, “all that way, you’ve heard Caroline-Ann of Airy’s song?”
He ducked his head, mock-humble. “Even in the Kintucky outback,” he said, “we have comsets. I know all the verses-shall I prove that?”
“Mercy, don’t! I’d feel a fool for sure, sitting in my own room and hearing you sing a song about me.”
“Well, then,” he said, “because you are so highly valued, I’d thought it might be harder to find myself alone with you. I was prepared for . . . oh, at least a Granny in a fury, to bar my way.”
“And so she would, if she knew you were here,” said Responsible.
“And what will she do when she finds me here?”
Responsible shook her head in amazement. “Young Wommack,” she said, “you are downright ignorant, not to mention insulting. Even here, `in the Brightwater outback,’ we know to knock on doors. Even Grannys don’t enter rooms without leavewhy should she find you here? I don’t intend to give her leave.”
He stood up at that, drew closed the curtains at all three of her windows, and went and stretched himself full length on her bed. She liked the look of him against her white counterpane, and she told him so.
He didn’t pause to acknowledge the compliment.
“You learned many things, touring the Castles, having adventures,” he said. “Now come learn something useful.”
She was still thinking she would do no such thing when she lay down beside him. Her counterpane was turned down, and her clothes and his lay in a jumble on her rug, and the thought still lingered. Only when she noted that she had been right, that the copper hair covered him in all but two or three specific places, did she abandon that idea and concede that she was indeed about to learn something.
“I am not ready for this,” she announced.
And there are times when the land is not ready for the rain, but it falls all the same.
He ran his fingertips over her thighs, and set his lips to her nipples, and he was not overly careful how much of his weight she had to bear.
“I dislike that,” she said clearly.
“This, too?”
“I dislike that even more.”
“You lie,” he said.
She surely did. Everything his body had promised, shirted and trousered and cloaked, it delivered in abundance. Her loins arched toward his touch and she knew most clearly the meaning of longing. She was all out of patience, the aching of her body for him was unbearable, and if she had known any manner of hurrying him she would not have scrupled to use it. Unfortunately, she was operating this time from a position of total ignorance, and she could only grit her teeth till she shuddered, and wait.
“You’re an anxious creature,” he said finally, and he lifted her onto the gold of his belly and set her gently where she might ease her own need. It was not what she had expected at all, and certainly not what her experience in the stables and goatbarns had led her to expect, and she moaned in desperate frustration.
“It’s impossible,” She said. “It can’t be done this way!”
“Lady; lady,” he answered her, “I promised to teach you something useful, For sure it can be done this way, if you will onlythere!”
Nothing she had heard or read or imagined had prepared her for what it was like to have the full thrust of his maleness within her, and she forgot everything in her determination to draw from him every last measure of the ecstasy offered.
“You see?” h¢ said roughly.
She did, most certainly she did, and when he would have held her away from him she, cried out fiercely and slapped at him, frantic in her determination to achieve something-her body knew what it was, though her mind did not-and he laughed and let her have her way for a while.
Until she hovered just on the edge of that achievement. And then, ignoring her teeth and her hands, he held her still in torment against him.
“Oh, dear heaven, dear heaven,” she moaned, “let me loose!”
“Shhhhh. . . hush. . .”
“No! I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it another second . . .”
She fell against him, broken in despair, sobbing and past all pride, and he made a soft noise of satisfaction, gripped her in those sure hands, and held her while the shudders racked her, more and more swift, and her breath tore at her throat, and then he said:
“Now, Responsible of Brightwater. Now I shall show you the most useful thing of all.”
And he grasped her hips and moved her, and suddenly she knew that she would die of joy, and he muffled her screams against his shoulders and let her take of him everything that she wanted. It took a very long time, and not once did he make a sound.
She had heard women speak, married women and women of experience, of what happened after the act of love. Some men, it seemed, would talk to you. Others would fall asleep. Some would demand food; among the Traveller males, she had heard it said, there were those that would drop to their knees and give thanks for the blessings just received.
This man, however, was doing none of those things. He had raised himself on one elbow and was staring at her as if he had never seen anything like her before anywhere. Responsible had no illusions about her beauty, she had Thorn of Guthrie to compare herself with every day of her life; it could not be that which put such an expression on his face. And she was reasonably sure that the look he bore was not the usual afterlove expression.
“What,” he demanded harshly, “was that? What the Twelve Bleeding Gates happened?”
Responsible reminded him that she had been the virgin here, not him, which made that a foolish question. “There are a number of words to choose from,” she added, “always depending on your degree of delicacy. Pick the one you like the best.”
“That’s not what I meant.” And then, “You didn’t notice anything unusual?”
Responsible made an exasperated noise and climbed over him abruptly, heading for her bath. The bed was a sea-marsh, and she was not much better.
“Young man,” she said over her shoulder, “I have never lain with a man before you. If there was something unusual, I wouldn’t know it. What do I have to compare with you?”
He followed her into the bathroom and joined her in the hot water, still frowning, and the frown lasted until they both were clean and once again clothed, and sitting in the two rockers as sedately as if nothing but conversation had ever passed between them.
“I must have imagined it,” he stated.
“No. I am convinced that it truly did happen. I was there, Lewis Motley.”
“Responsible of Brightwater, do you remember what you said to me, just at the last?”
It hardly seemed proper, but then nothing they’d done in the past hour had been proper. She thought for a moment, and then answered him to the best of her recollection.
“I said . . . `My lovely one, it is so wonderful to be inside you.’ “
He cleared his throat, and directed her to think about that. “Doesn’t it seem to you,” he asked, “that the anatomy is just a tad scrambled?”
She thought about it, and saw what he meant.
“Isn’t it always like that?” she asked. “After all, it’s mighty close contact.”
“Not that close,” he said. “No. It is not always like that. In fact, it is not ever like that.”
She set her lips, and found that she was no longer afraid of his eyes.
“It was like that,” she declared. “I was there, and so were you, and for certain sure it was precisely like that. And if you didn’t want it to be like that, you should have provided a lecture as you went along.”
He was going to be a very stubborn man, she thought, immovable as a mountain; a natural force like a tide or a storm, against which you could break into a thousand pieces, and he would never notice. And she thought, somewhat more than a little belatedly, of the Time Corner Prophecy. There was a lot in there about what would happen if she “stood before him.” She doubted that what she’d done could be so described.
“Law,” she whispered, more to herself than to him, “I wonder what will happen now?”
He swore, and stood up to stand with his back to her, staring out of her window, holding back one curtain with his hand.
In honest bewilderment she asked him, “Why are you angry?”
“I’m not angry,” he said, but he didn’t turn around, and she knew that now he lied.
“Lewis Motley Wommack,” she said, “go eat with the children. They’ll be serving them now.”
He left her without another word, and she sat there rocking until the last light was gone from her room and she rocked in full darkness. She wasn’t sorry for what she had done; nothing that pleasant could be a thing to regret. And her fear of him was gone for good and all. But the consequences of what she had done, now there was something to ponder on. For one thing, she was vulnerable to a number of unpleasant things that her virginity had protected her from until now. The Magicians of Rank would not need to be half so constrained in their constant wearing away at her, now that she lacked her maidenhead, and the first to take a look at her tomorrow would know that. As would the Grannys, one and all. But the Prophecy had been most specific: whatever it was that she would loose upon this world, she and Jewel of Wommack’s brother, the harm would not come from knowledge shared by their bodies. That was laid out unmistakably.
She knew his body well now, and intended to know it a great deal better; and with his skill he no doubt knew everything there was to know about hers. But if it was not that, not that knowledge that held the danger, what was it then? They had not talked as much as you did over the ordinary cup of coffee.
“Botheration,” said Responsible, and decided she didn’t want any supper.
She would take off her sheets, for they reeked of salt, and sleep that night on her counterpane. Let Granny Leeward lie on the other side of the wall and wonder why the daughter of this Castle had not appeared for supper; the daughter of this Castle would be sound asleep and not caring.
Tomorrow would be burden enough, when she had to face them all and see in their eyes-even Leeward’s-that they knew of the change in her. Tomorrow there’d be no eternal agenda of ceremonies and prayers to hold back the plans of the delegations set to bring down the Confederation, the fools! Tomorrow she would sit in the balcony and watch, alert for the slightest move, the least word, the beginning of crisis, the turn that would mean it was time to call on the loyal delegations and find a way to put the necessary words in their mouths.
Tonight, she would sleep.