Mount Troublesome was not much, as mountains go; it peaked at a tad past four thousand feet, and it hadn’t a glacier or a crevasse to its name. On the other hand, though it didn’t live up to the “Mount” part, it more than made up for that in its fidelity to the “Troublesome” part. It missed no smallest opportunity for ravines to get stuck in and caves to get lost in and vast thickets to be scratched ragged in; and it was abundantly generous in poisonous ivies and creepers winding along the ground and up around the trees to hang down and smack you in the face. Springs were everywhere, trickling along under matted undergrowth that looked solid as a stable roof, till you set foot on it and sank in icy water up to your knees. There were waterfalls’ enough to go around, pretty white water gushing over sheer rock faces into pools circled by ferns and nearwillows. The pools were tempting to the eye, and might of been pleasant-feeling, but you waded them at your peril and the pleasure of dozens of small ferocious yellow snakes with ingeniously notched teeth. It did happen to be a fact that Mount Troublesome was the tallest thing on the entire continent of Marktwain.
The seven old women toiling their way up its tangled sides were more than satisfied with the obstacles it presented. If it had been any worse, there was considerable doubt in their minds that they could of made it to the top at all.
“Drat the ornery female!” Granny Sherryjake had declared after the second time a whole hour had to be wasted finding a way round a berry thicket as impenetrable as solid rock and twice as unpleasant. And she went on to expand on that, and elaborate on it, and weave variations on it, as the hours went by and it became obvious that there was no way they could reach the top before nightfall. They’d be overnighting out on the mountain.
But Granny Hazelbide, that was in residence along with Granny Gableframe at Castle Brightwater, had taken exception to that. It was fully appropriate, she’d said, slapping back at a branch that had slapped her first, for a woman named Troublesome to choose a mountain named Troublesome when she went into exile.
“Fully appropriate, and seemly,” said Granny Hazelbide. “I’d of done the same exact thing, in her place.”
“Well,” grumbled Sherryjake, “there may be something to what you say.”
“I should hope and declare there is. Naming is naming!”
“But,” went on the other doggedly, “I do not see that there was any special merit to be gained from her establishing herself at the very most tip top of this accursed hump of dirt and rock. She was not named Peak of Troublesome, you know. Halfway up would of done it, seems to me. Quarterways up.”
“Troublesome of Brightwater was instructed to take herself as far away from the rest of the population of Brightwater as it was possible for her to get,” said Granny Frostfall firmly. “I hold with Hazelbide; she did what was proper. But I surely do not find that it makes for a pleasant little stroll.”
“Time was,” fussed Granny Gableframe, “this would of been no more than that, for any of us.”
“And in such a time,” snorted Granny Frostfall, “we’d none of us of crossed a city street to pay a call on Troublesome of Brightwater. Can’t say as how I see that it applies, Gableframe.”
Granny Gableframe didn’t bother to argue, but sighed a long sigh and took a firmer grip on her walking stick with her thin old fingers. It wouldn’t do to lose it.
Grannys had always been thin, that went with the territory; but these seven were thin to the bone, and those bones pained them. Grannys had always been old; but up till recently they’d been protected from the usual miseries of old age by their own Granny Magic, and from its more unusual miseries by the skills of the Magicians and the Magicians of Rank. Without that protection, things had changed for them. Angina and arthritis, gall-bladder colic and kidney trouble, ulcers and headaches and high blood pressure, all the bodily discomforts taken for granted as the lot of any aged woman on Old Earth, had struck the Grannys of Ozark. It was even said that at Castle Clark—though she denied it fiercely—Granny Golightly was developing a cataract in her right eye.
Under the circumstances, when Granny Gableframe first proposed that the seven of them should go up to the mountaintop and talk to Troublesome of Brightwater, the hilarity had been like a squawkercoop with a serpent inside, and two servingmaids had come running to find out what the commotion was.
“You are daft, Gableframe,” the other Grannys had said with a single voice, and they’d sat in their rockers and cackled and held their aching sides at the very idea. Seven creaking old ladies, half blind and half deaf, feet too swollen to go in their shoes and bones so brittle they barely dared move them—and they were to trek up the meanest mountain on Marktwain in the middle of the autumn? It was a fool idea to top all fool ideas.
“That does take the rag off the bush, Gableframe,” they’d said, and it was unanimous.
“And what do you propose to do, ladies?” Gableframe had challenged them, standing there arms akimbo and her sharp chin stuck out ahead of her. “You propose to just sit here, do you? While the crops all die and the animals sicken and the people do the same, and Responsible of Brightwater lies month after weary month on that white counterpane, so still the only reason I can believe she’s alive is that her body has yet to mortify? Well, ladies? You laugh right prompt, real quick to make fun, you are! But I don’t hear you offering any plans of your own.”
They did know two things, there was that. In the first months after Responsible had been struck down, while the power of magic was waning but not yet exhausted, the Grannys had managed to learn two small pieces of information. They’d read tea leaves, they’d swung their golden rings on long black threads, they’d stared into springwater till their eyes were red and weeping, night after night. And back at them had come two scraps.
The reason behind the trouble, the reason behind Responsible’s deathlike interminable sleep, was “an important man.” That had come first, and after much labor, and had irritated them considerably. Then there had been the search for that man’s location in this world, holding the golden rings over the maps, holding their breaths as well, waiting for one ring to begin its telltale swinging and circling. All atremble like they were, it took a sharp eye to tell when the movement was of its own self and when it was just the doings of a Granny that’s hand was no longer steady.
And then there’d been argument. The Spells were so little use by then, the movement of the rings so near no movement at all, and so ambiguous—was it Tinaseeh or was it Kintucky? All of a week they’d nattered over that, half for one and half for the other, knowing that if they made the wrong choice there’d be no second chance. There weren’t resources enough for trying twice, for one thing. And for another, if anything was to be done it had to be done swiftly; there was nothing in the way of extra resources of time, either.
Grannys Gableframe, Whifflebee, and Edging had been strong for Tinaseeh, swearing it was Jeremiah Thomas Traveller that was the “important man.” Did he not, after all, rule that continent with a fist of iron, and hadn’t he always? And hadn’t he always hated Responsible of Brightwater and everything she stood for?
“Hmmph,” said Granny Cobbledrayke of Castle McDaniels, “it’s not Jeremiah Thomas as rules Tinsaseeh, it’s his mother, her that took Leeward as her Granny Name and is about as much like a leeward side in a storm as a lizard’s like a bellybutton. Don’t give me Jeremiah Thomas Traveller for an ‘important man’—he’s a mama’s boy, and always was.”
She, and the rest of the Marktwain Grannys, had been set on Kintucky, and Castle Wommack. Hadn’t Responsible herself, they argued, run away from Castle Wommack—her that wasn’t afraid of anything living or dead—run away, rather than face Lewis Motley Wommack? And wasn’t it Lewis Motley Wommack that now governed all of Kintucky?
“He is barely twenty-one years old—wouldn’t be, not quite yet,” Gableframe protested. “A boy yet, last time we saw him! Here for the Jubilee, remember? With his little sister Jewel set to tag around after him and keep him out of mischief? How can that one be the ‘important man,’ I ask you?”
“He is important on Kintucky,” said Sherryjake.
“Well, we don’t know how that came to be,” grumbled the others. “We don’t know atall. Way our magic was working in those last months, for all we know the messages we got were plain scrambled ... might could be Jacob Donahue Wommack the 23rd’s still hale and hearty and Master of that Castle and the whole tale about it being Lewis Motley in charge is no more than a puckerwrinkle in a puny Spell. Who’d be fool enough to put a wild colt like that one in charge of a Kingdom? Now I ask you ...”
But the time had come when the decision had to be made; and for want of anything better to base it on they’d deferred to Granny Hazelbide, seeing as it was Hazelbide had had the raising of Responsible of Brightwater and knew her best of any of them.
Now, fighting the thorns and the vines and the poison weeds, keeping a sharp eye for the false earth over running water, making a hardscrabble way up through a drizzle that threatened to be a rain and praying they’d find at least an overhang to shelter them through this night, they hoped they’d decided rightly. Everything rode on this one throw of the dice, and Granny Hazelbide shivered with more than the fever that plagued her now every day of her life, thinking what she’d done if it was the wrong choice and she had convinced the others of it. And what they’d do to her ... law, that would be a production!
“Ah, Hazelbide,” said Granny Willowithe, her that almost never spoke, and had done her grannying in the farther reaches of the Kingdom where there were few to bother her, “if you are wrong!” It was always that way. Those as spoke rarely, when they did speak it tended to be significant—and to be what everybody else was thinking and hadn’t gotten up gumption to give voice to.
Troublesome of Brightwater woke to a wind howling round her cabin doors and windows, and that was ordinary enough. She woke also to a downright infuriated rapping on her cabin door, and that was distinctly not ordinary. Over ten years she’d been here now, and she’d never had a visitor but her little sister, and that only three times. It could not be her little sister this time. She listened again, and stretched in the warmth of her bed, wondering if it had been maybe something blown by the winds, or something in a dream, half a mind to go back to sleep. And then the hollering came:
“Troublesome of Brightwater, will you open this door? Or have you taken to murdering old ladies along with the rest of your wicked ways?”
That brought her up out of her bed in a hurry. Old ladies, was it, on her doorsill? She went to the door just as she was, and stood there before them mother-naked and barefoot, with no cover but the heavy black hair that tumbled almost to her knees. She held the door with one hand and set the other on the curve of her shameless hip, and she sighed a sigh of sheer wonderment.
“Whatever in all the world?” breathed Troublesome of Brightwater, looking them over. “Whatever in all the wondering twelvesquare world?”
The Grannys were a sight to behold, for sure. They were wet and they were dirty and they were nettlestung, and they were cold and wrinkled and miserable. With no more Housekeeping Spells to use, and nothing around for a tidy-up but one stream the width of their hand trickling over slabs of bare rock, they were as pitiful a representation of seven old ladies as had ever met the eye.
“Out of my way, trollop,” announced Granny Gableframe, and would of pushed right past Troublesome into the welcome warmth of the cabin; but the young woman barred her way with one sturdy arm.
“I’m no trollop, Granny Gableframe,” she said. “I’m virgin as I came from my mother’s womb—and that’s more than any one of you here can say back at me, as I recollect. As for my costume, I don’t recall sending out any invitations. You’ve gotten potluck, Grannys.”
“Law, the creature’s enjoying it,” muttered Granny Hazelbide. She’d had the raising of her, too. “Troublesome,” she demanded, “will you for the love of decency drop that arm and let us in? We are tired near to death, we spent all yesterday on this mountain and all last night in a cave full of varmints and dripping water, and we’ve no magic any more to ease the toll all that has taken. Would it pleasure you to see one of us drop dead right here before your eyes, you dreadful female?”
Troublesome dropped her arm at that and let them by, saying: “Well, that’s more fair. A trollop I’m not, but a dreadful female I’m willing to admit to. Do come in, and I’ll put the kettle on and stir up the fire. I don’t suppose youall’d take your clothes off and let me hang them to dry, would you?”
That met the frigid silence she’d anticipated, and she nodded her head in resignation.
“Stay cold and wet, then,” she said, “and die of pneumonia, not on my doorstep but on my hearthstone—but don’t you lay it to my account. There’s not a one of you as has anything different to her body than I have myself, and I do believe I could bear the sight of your old skinny-skin-skins ... for sure I would not lust after you! But if you rank your modesty higher than your misery, so be it; I’ll not squabble with you.”
The cabin was small and bare, and even after Troublesome got the fire crackling in the fireplace the best she could do was pull up a rough board bench with no back to it for them all to sit on and try to bake the damp from their bones. Troublesome had no rugs, and no curtains; her bed was a pallet laid on a rope frame in the corner, she had one straight chair and one rocker and one low stepladder and a small square table and a cookstove. And except for a bucket or two and a shelf here and there, that was it. The Grannys were bemused by it, even with their teeth chattering.
“Don’t have eight cups, do you?” asked Granny Sherryjake.
Troublesome chuckled, and admitted she didn’t, and served them up the scalding tea in an assortment of jars and ladles and whatnots that was ingenious, but not elegant.
“Never needed more than three before,” she told them. “One to drink with, one to measure with, and one in the dishpan soaking.”
“I can’t say as you exactly ... do yourself proud,” commented Granny Frostfall, and a kind of snort of agreement ran down the bench.
“No, I don’t suppose I do,” Troublesome agreed.
“Tain’t natural,” said one, and Troublesome’s eyebrows rose.
“You expected things up here to be natural?” she asked.
The Grannys sighed all together, seeing it was a hopeless case, and Troublesome went to a row of three pegs on a wall by her bed and took down a long dress all in a soft scarlet wool and slipped it over her head.
“There,” she said, “now I’ll not be quite such an offense to your eyes.” And her long fingers were almost too quick for those same fourteen sharp eyes to see as she put the mass of hair into a braid and wound it up around her head and fastened it tight.
It was unjust that anything so wicked should be so beautiful, or so clever, or so serene, or so happy with her lot—especially the last—and the Grannys stared glumly into the fire and pondered on that.
“Well, ladies,” Troublesome said at last, sitting herself down on an upended bucket with her arms wrapped round her knees, since it wouldn’t of been mannerly to take a chair while the old women huddled on that bench, “now you’re a bit warmer and dryer, maybe you’d tell me what I’m beholden to for the pleasure of your company?”
“Maybe you might offer us a bite of breakfast first!” snapped Granny Gableframe. “If you care to spare it!”
“It’s already cooking,” said Troublesome calmly, “but I can’t do anything much to hurry it along. And while we’re waiting on it—no, I don’t have eight plates either, but as it happens I do have eight spoons—while we’re waiting on it I see no reason not to make the time go by speaking up on the reason for this visit. I’m afraid I’m not much for visitors.”
The Grannys allowed as how they never would of figured that out if she hadn’t mentioned it, and she chuckled again.
“Earn your keep, you dear old things,” she teased them, brazen as brazen, “earn your keep. What brings you hanging round my door all unannounced and unkempt, with snow before the week’s out or my name’s not Troublesome of Brightwater? You should be home, each in your rocker with your knitting, by your own fire, telling terrible stories to the tadlings.”
Granny Hazelbide was embarrassed; true, this one was properly Named, and her outrageousness came as no surprise to anybody, but it had been her, poor Granny Hazelbide, that had tried to keep some control over her when she was a little girl at Castle Brightwater.
“Troublesome,” she said sadly, “have you no feelings atall?”
“Probably not,” said Troublesome promptly. “Feelings about what?”
“Times are hard, young woman,” said Hazelbide, “times are fearsome hard! You talk of sitting by our fires ... there’s precious little left to lay a fire with, down in the towns. People are suffering, and your own sister lies near death in the Castle. How can you sit these and face us and make jokes over it all?”
“Would it help,” Troublesome put the question, “if I moaned about it instead? Would it ease anybody’s fever, stop anybody’s bleeding, or put food in anybody’s stomach or fire on their hearth? Would it wake my sister—who is not, by the way, anywhere near death. Not as near as the seven of you, I assure you.”
“Ah, you’re heartless,” Granny Hazelbide mourned. “Just heartless!”
Troublesome said nothing at all, but waited and watched, and they began to smell the porridge on the stove and their stomachs knotted.
“Well, we want you to make a journey,” said Granny Gableframe when it finally became clear that they’d get no more out of the girl. “A long and a perilous journey. And that’s why we’re here ... to ask you. Politely.”
Troublesome stared at her, black brows knit over her nose, and gave a sharp “tchh” with her tongue.
“A journey? Go on a trip?”
“Yes. And a good long one.”
She stood up and went to the stove and began passing the porridge over to them, warning them to use their shawls to hold on so they’d not burn their fingers.
“Certainly can’t hurt the shawls, the state they’re in,” she said.
She watched them while they ate; and seeing that they were truly hungry, she didn’t bother them, but busied herself pouring more tea and serving more porridge until it seemed to her that everybody was at last satisfied and she could gather up the motley collection of serving things in her apron and put it all into a pan of hot soapy water.
Whereupon she sat down, shaking her hands to dry them, and said, “No more excuses, now. You’re dry, and you’re warm, and you’re fed and watered. It’s too cold for you to be taking baths at your age, so you’ll have to stay dirty, and I’ve no remedies for your other miseries; I’ve made you as comfortable as I’m capable of. Now I’ll have you tell me about this journey, thank you kindly.”
“We want you to go to Castle Wommack,” said Granny Hazelbide, and Troublesome almost fell off her makeshift stool in astonishment.
“To Kintucky? Granny, you’ve lost your mind entirely! However would I get to Castle Wommack?”
“On a ship.”
“Granny Hazelbide, there’s no ship goes to Kintucky any more, and no supplies to last the journey if there were. You’ve been nibbling something best left on its stem, I say.”
“We have a ship,” said Hazelbide, putting one stubborn word after another, “and a crew—not much of a crew, but it’ll serve in this instance—and supplies enough to get all of you to Kintucky and back. Including the Mule you’ll be taking along to get you from the coast to the Castle.”
“Dozens!” said Troublesome. “I’d of said that was impossible.”
“It wasn’t cheap.”
“It took all we had,” put in Granny Whiffletree, “and all that the Grannys had on Oklahomah, and a contribution or two—not necessarily voluntary, if you take my meaning—from a few useless Magicians and Magicians of Rank. But we did it.”
“Bribed the ship captain, did you? And bribed the crew?”
“That we did.”
“And you think they’ll stay bribed!”
“We do. The captain’s a Brightwater, and all but one of the crew as well. And that one’s a McDaniels. They’ll stay bribed.”
“Supposing,” hazarded Troublesome, leaning forward, “that I was such a lunatic as to go gallivanting off to Kintucky in the middle of the autumn ... just suppose that, which I’m not ... what precisely is my goal, other than to drown myself and the captain and the crew and that poor Mule?”
They told her, and they watched her face go thoughtful, and Granny Gableframe pinched the next Granny down on the bench, gently; they knew then that they had her.
“I agree,” said Troublesome slowly, “that it’s sure to be Lewis Motley Wommack the 3rd. I do agree on that. Not a thing Jeremiah Thomas Traveller could have done that would account for what’s happened, but that Wommack boy is something else again, and I do believe he lay with Responsible while the Jubilee was going on.”
“So that’s who it was!” exclaimed Granny Hazelbide. “How did you know?”
“Ask me no questions. Granny, I’ll tell you no lies,” said Troublesome. “It makes no nevermind how I knew. But you’ve chosen right, for sure and for certain—However ... you’ve nothing here but missing pieces.”
“Explain yourself!”
“Did you learn, before your magic wound down, that if somebody went to see this ‘important man’ it would make some difference in the course of events on Ozark?” Troublesome stared them down, and they had to admit that they hadn’t.
“And did you learn that just because he’s the cause of Responsible’s hearty nap he knows how to wake her up again?
“And did you learn that even if my sister was awake again, she’d be able to do something about all this tribulation we suffer from? Did you?”
It was no to both, of course, and they had to admit it.
“But you’d send me half round the world on a wild goose chase, on the slim tagtail of a chance that there might be some use to it?”
And they agreed that they would.
“Well,” said Troublesome. “I never heard such nonsense.”
“Sass!”
“No, I never did. Unless it was youall coming up here like you did, risking pneumonia coming up and breaking every bone in your bodies going down— ‘cause you pay me mind, now, if you thought you had a hard time getting up here, you just wait till you try getting back down! It’s a heap faster, but it’s not a safe trip. No way, no way in this world, am I going to take any part in such a fool project, and you should of known better than to ask me.”
“Your sister lies— “
“Tell me no more about how my sister lies!” shouted Troublesome. “And tell me no more about the suffering of the people down there below! Wasn’t it those very same people that would not heed my sister when she tried to warn them, and voted away the government that was holding them all together? Wasn’t it?”
“Troublesome— “
“And for all my sister had done for them, was it not those very same people that showed her no more gratitude than they would a stick? That’s the people we’re talking about, amn’t I right, Grannys? Don’t you ask me to feel sorry for those people—I despise them for a pack of contemptible ignorant two-faced good-for-nothing belly-creeping serpents, do you hear me? If their stomachs hurt them and their backs pain them and their hearts are broken, they’ve asked for that, and no call to come whimpering to me! They made their beds, let them wallow in them and cry in their pillows.”
“And your sister?” said Granny Hazelbide, ever so carefully, in the hush. When Troublesome got going, she gave a spectacular performance, and even the Grannys were impressed just a tad.
“It is well known,” said Troublesome of Brightwater in tones of ice, “that I have no natural human feelings. My sister can rot there for all I care—not that she will, that doesn’t go with it, but she’s welcome to—and you know it perfectly well. Ask any man, woman, or tadling on Marktwain about the compassion and the warm heart of Troublesome of Brightwater and see what you get back, if you don’t know it already!”
Troublesome wasn’t out of breath, but she was out of patience and way beyond out of hospitality. She stood up then and ordered them off, ignoring what they said about needing to rest, stuffing a careless handful of peachapples in a sack with some cold biscuits and shoving it at them for food on the journey home, telling them where the water was safe to drink and which paths to stay shut of. Warning them of a place where the snakes were thick this time of year because of a rock that got warm each day in the sun, and all but slamming her door behind them. They were back out in the weather and the downhill trek ahead of them before they could catch their breaths, and they heard the thump of that bucket as it hit the wall when she gave it a toss across the room.
“Well!” said Granny Frostfall. “I’ve seen manners, and I’ve seen manners ... but she does beat all. She is every last thing she’s made out to be, and some left over, and I’ll wager she eats nails for breakfast when she’s got no company to see her.”
“She has a reputation to maintain,” pointed out Granny Hazelbide.
“What’s important,” said Granny Gableframe, “and all that matters now except for getting down this dratted mountain, is that she’ll do it.”
“We’re sure of that, Gableframe? I don’t see it!”
“Oh, we’re sure,” said Gableframe; and Granny Hazelbide and Granny Sherryjake agreed. “We had her the minute she asked us to tell her about it, don’t you know anything atall? If she’d turned us a deaf ear, now, and refused to even listen, and sent us all packing without so much as letting us tell her why we were here ... well, that would of been Troublesome’s way.”
“Oh, yes,” said Granny Hazelbide. “We’ve got her fast, the Twelve Corners preserve us all.”
“But how’ll she know where to go? How to find the ship?”
“I had that all on a slip of paper before ever we started up this overblown hill,” sniffed Granny Hazelbide. “And tucked away safe in the pocket of my skirt. And it’s tucked away safe now in her own hand, everything she needs to know. She gave that bucket quite a fling, there at the last, and she may well pitch the bench we sat on into her fire—but she’ll keep that piece of paper safe. Every last detail she needs to know, it’s on there.”
“Law, Granny Hazelbide,” said one or two. And “My stars, Hazelbide.”
“Well, I know her,” said the Granny. “I know her well.”
“Can’t say as I envy you that.”
“I don’t envy myself that, but there’s times it’s useful,” said Granny Hazelbide. “And now let’s us head for home. Might could be we’ll make it before dark. Like Troublesome said, it’s a sight faster going down than coming up.”