“I say we should use the lasers, and the devil take the treaties.” The King of Parson Kingdom took a look at their faces and shivered in the cold, and he said it over again, louder and clearer, to be sure they’d heard him.
There’d been a day when a statement like that, all naked and unadorned and enough to shock the whiskers off a grown man’s face, would have been cushioned somewhat by the rugs and draperies and furnishings of Castle Parson. No longer. The Castle had been stripped of everything that had any value, and it was nothing now but a great hulk of stone in which every word echoed and bounced from wall to wall and down the bare corridors. Any citizen choosing to look in the windows at the royal Family might do so; no curtains hung there. And the chair where Granny Dover sat pursing her lips at the King’s scandalous talk was the only chair they had left; a rocker for the Granny in residence, and a courtesy to her old bones. As for the rest of them, they sat on the floor and leaned against the wall, or dragged up the rough workbenches that had once been out in the stables and now served for eating meals. When there were meals, which was far from always.
“Jordan Sanderleigh Parson the 23rd,” said the Granny grimly—she’d never said “Your Majesty” to him nor ever would— “you’ve been hinting at that, and tippytoeing around that, these last three days now ... but I never thought I’d live to hear you come right out and say it in so many words.”
“And only blind luck that you have lived that long,” the man retorted.
“No,” said the old lady. “Many a thing as has changed in these terrible times, many a thing. Kings at Farson and Guthrie, ‘stead of Masters of the Castle, as has been since First Landing and is decent and respectable! Three old fools at Castle Purdy calling themselves Senators, if you please, and splitting the Kingdom’s governance three ways, when they never could run it even when it wasn’t split and they had tradition to give ‘em a clue what to do every now and again!”
“Granny, don’t start,” begged the King, but she paid him no mind whatsoever.
“But the day’s not come yet,” she went on. “when an Ozarker—always excepting the filthy Magicians of Rank, that, praise be, have had their teeth pulled anyway—when an Ozarker would raise a hand to harm a Granny. I’ll be here a while yet, if we do live on weeds and bad fish. I’ll be here a while.”
Marycharlotte of Wommack, huddled against the draft in a corner more or less sheltered from the wind, challenged her husband and drew her shawl tighter round her shoulders.
“We gave our word,” she flung at him, “as did Castles Guthrie and Purdy! We aren’t degraded enough, living worse than animals in a cave—at least they have fur enough to keep them warm, or sense enough to sleep the winter out—we aren’t degraded enough? Eating thin soup three times a day, made like the Granny says out of weeds and roots and one bad fish to a kettleful, and the Twelve Gates only knows what people not at the Castle must be living on! That’s not enough for you yet? All the animals slaughtered, all the children and the old people sick, and the young ones fast joining them, that won’t satisfy you men? Must we be liars and traitors as well, before you’ve had enough?”
Jordan Sanderleigh Farson turned his back on his Queen and spoke to the wall before him, down which a skinny trickle of water ran day and night from the damp and the fog.
“We cannot go on like this,” he said dully.
“There’s a choice?”
“We cannot go on fighting a war,” answered the King, “grown men from a time when ships can travel from star to star and computers can send messages over countless thousands of miles ... fighting a war with sticks, and boulders, and knives, and a handful of rifles meant for hunting or taken out of display cases at the museums. You should see it out there, you two ... you’re so smug, you should go take a long look. It’s a giant foolery, entirely suitable for the comedy at a lowquality fair in a Purdy back county. Except that people are not laughing, you know. People are dying.”
“I thought that’s what you wanted,” said Marycharlotte. “People dying.”
“You made it right plain that was what you wanted, all you men,” Granny Dover backed her up. “No question.”
The man leaned against the wall, whether it was despair or exhaustion or both they did not know, and shouted at the two of them.
“We never had any intention that it was to drag on and on and on like this!” he roared. “A week or two, we thought, maybe a month or two at worst and a few hundred dead, and then it would be over! This isn’t what we meant to have happen ... oh, the Holy One help me in a bitter hour, it was never what was intended, never!”
The two women, the one near a hundred years old and the other in the full bloom of her years, but both little more than bones wrapped in frayed rags, they kept their silence. He looked to them for the smooth moves to comfort that he expected, the reassurance that of course it wasn’t his fault and he had done all he could and more than most would of been able to; and none of that was forthcoming. They didn’t say to stop his whining ... but he heard it nonetheless. Jordan Sanderleigh, raised on the constant soothing words and hands of Ozark women, felt utterly abandoned. This was indeed a new day, and a new time altogether, when the women of his own household looked at him like they would a benastied three-year-old.
“Jordan Sanderleigh,” said the Granny, and she measured her words out one by one and hammered them in with the tip of her cane, “when this war began, a Solemn Council was held. All the Families of Arkansaw, there assembled. And it was agreed that we were Ozarkers, not barbarians such as we left on Old Earth because we despised them worse than vermin! And it was agreed that in the name of decency, to which we still lay claim, I hope, no Arkansawyer would use a laser against another or against another’s holdings. Signed it was, and sealed. And we’ll not be the ones as goes back on it.”
The man flung himself down on the nearest window ledge and closed his eyes. He remembered the occasion well. Himself, King of Farson; James John the 17th, King of Guthrie; the three Purdy Senators ... the Granny was right that they were fools, all they could do was squabble among themselves, but they’d had dignity that day, the Purdy crest on their shoulders and their staffs of office in their hands. And the women, all absent to show their disapproval, but willing when it was over to admit that if there had to be a war it was a considerable improvement over the ancient kind for them to meet before it and set up its conditions. He had not been ashamed that day, and he had not been poor; he had been eager to get at the war, to settle once and for all the question of who should be first on Arkansaw, to be done with it and take up their lives once again. And he had been more than willing to sign that treaty banning the lasers ... it was civilized.
“We all die, then,” he said aloud. “Slowly. Like fools and lunatics.”
The Granny hesitated not one second. “So be it,” she said.
“Ah, you women are hard,” mourned the man.
“Ah, you men are fools. And lunatics.” Marycharlotte of Wommack mocked him, matching her tones exactly to his. And he said nothing more.
Out in the ravaged Wilderness Lands of Arkansaw the struggle went on, as it had for near twelve months now. First there had been the preliminary squabbling, as each of the Castles moved to lay out that it should rule over all on Arkansaw henceforth, and be first among the three Kingdoms, and had thought to do that with words and threats and strutting about. There’d been no idiot behavior such as had disgraced Castle Smith, no purple velvet and ermine and jeweled scepters and Dukes and Duchesses—a King and a Queen, dressed as they’d always dressed, that had sufficed. But it had never occurred to either Farson or Guthrie that the two other Castles would argue about their obvious and predestined supremacy on the continent.
And then when it became obvious to everybody that neither Farson nor Guthrie would ever accept the other, and that Castle Purdy would never do more than wait to see which was the winner so that it could join that side, there had been the period of drawing back to the Castles to decide what was to be done. There had been the shameful ravaging of the tiny continent of Mizzurah off Arkansaw’s western coast, both the Kingdoms of Lewis and of Motley, so that that land which had been the greenest and fairest of all Ozark now looked like the aftertime of a series of plagues and visitations of the wrath of some demented god. Not that Mizzurah had wanted any part in the feuds of Arkansaw, but that Arkansaw had been desperate for even Mizzurah’s pitiful resources.
And then the war had broken out—with the dignified meeting first, of course, to lay down the rules—and it dragged on still. Civil war.
When the citizens of Mizzurah had been ordered to join in the fighting on Arkansaw, they had made it more than clear that no amount of harassment would bring them to any such pass, so that it had been necessary for the Arkansawyers to take the Masters of Castles Motley and Lewis and hold them hostage at Castle Guthrie as surety against their people’s obedience.
And now the men of Mizzurah fought alongside the men of Arkansaw, divided up three ways among the three Castles as was fair and proper, since it was that or see the hostages hung, or worse; but they spoke not one word, and they never would. In silence, they drew their knives, that had been intended for the merciful killing of herdbeasts, and used them on other Ozarkers as they were commanded, excepting always the delicate care they used to be sure they raised no hand against another Mizzuran. In the same silence they dropped great boulders from Arkansaw’s cliffs down on columns of climbing men, and threw staffs of Tinaseeh ironwood to pin men against those cliffs for a death not one of them would have inflicted on any animal. The officers had the few rifles, and no Mizzuran was an officer, which meant they had no shooting to do, and that was probably just as well. The Lewises were without question the best shots on Ozark, having always fancied the sport of shooting at targets, and keeping it up over the centuries when most of the Families had let the skill fall away into disuse.
The Mizzurah women fought beside their men, those not required back at home to care for tadlings and babes. “If the men must go, we go also,” they’d said, and the women of Arkansaw, that would have nothing to do with the civil war among their men themselves, had nodded their heads in approval. It was fitting, and they would have done the same, had the situations been the same. They had been much embarrassed when a Purdy female, a tad confused about what was after all a complicated ethical question, took up an ironwood staff and marched off to join her older brother in the Battle of Saints Beard Creek; and it was the women of Castle Parson, happening to be closest, that had gone out and got the tool creature and brought her back to a willow switch across her bare buttocks, for all she was sixteen years of age. If that was what it took to make things clear at Castle Purdy, that was what it took, and they had not scrupled to do it.
Thirty men, two of them Mizzurans, were dug in at a mine entrance near the border of Farson Kingdom under the command of Nicholas Andrew Guthrie the 41st, on this day. Three days they’d been there now, and though water was plentiful it was fouled—that’d be the work of the Purdys, upstream—and the food was gone since the night before.
Their leader stared sullenly into the drizzle, and sat in the slimy packed layers of wet leaves at the mine-mouth, and would not be persuaded to go inside where it was at least dry.
“The sentries have to stay out here,” he pointed out.
“You’re not a sentry.”
“All the same.”
“It’s foolishness,” objected another Guthrie, close kin enough to offer open criticism regardless of rank. “What’ll you gain that way, except pneumonia?”
“Pneumonia,” said Nicholas Andrew Guthrie. “And I welcome it. Rather die that way than most of the other possibilities ... at least it’s an honorable death.”
“Not if you leave your men without a leader by catching it, you blamed pigheaded fool!”
Nicholas Andrew Guthrie didn’t even turn his head.
“What you talk there is the talk of a war that’s real,” he said, and spat to show his disgust. “This is no real war, and I’m no real leader, and youall’re no real soldiers. And you’d be no more leaderless without me than you are while I sit here and court the passing germs, so shut your mouth.”
“That’s inspiring talk,” said his cousin. “Really makes us all feel like throwing ourselves into the heat of battle, let me tell you.”
“You want inspiration,” said Nicholas Andrew, “you go home and get some. You’ll get none out here. Here, you’ve got nothing whatsoever to do but wait for a Farson, or might could be some pitiful Purdy, lost as usual, to show up, so you can stick him through the gut with whatever’s handy, or him you. Might could be you’d even have the privilege of doing your gutsticking on a Mizzurah woman, just for the variety of the thing. And everybody can cut one more notch on the timber nearest them to signify the occasion. That inspire you? It doesn’t inspire me, not the least bit.”
There was a long silence, broken only by the constant nameless noise the drizzle made. And then a man spoke from behind them. “How many do you reckon there are left of us?” He had a festering sore on his leg, that would get no better in this damp, and a bandage to his shoulder, and he leaned against the mine wall to keep from falling. “How many, sir?”
My brave and stalwart company, thought Nicholas Andrew wryly. My company of walking dead. Flourish of trumpets, roll of drums, off left. Aloud, he said he didn’t know.
“What with the bad food, and the sickness there’s neither magic nor medicine to treat, and what with the cold, and this bleeding twelvesquare excuse for a war ... there might could be two thousand of us, all told.”
“Two thousand, Nicholas Andrew Guthrie!” The man staggered and clutched at nothing, and somebody moved quickly to grab the shoulder that wasn’t hurt.
“Come on, now,” said the kinsman hastily, “you don’t mean that, and it’s a downright cruel thing to say.”
“Well, I stand by it,” snapped Nicholas Andrew. “And if only a Purdy or a Farson’d come by this place, might could be we’d be able to make that one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.”
There was silence behind him again, and he hoped it would last this time; he had no heart for talking to them. The figure he’d named was a blind guess, but it could not be much more than that. Taking it in round numbers, there’d been ninety thousand of them when this began; fifty thousand Guthries, twenty thousand Farsons, and twenty thousand Purdys. At least sixteen thousand Lewises and Motleys combined, he’d hazard. And what was left would hardly make one good-sized village ... and nothing gained for it, nor nothing ever to be gained. Over those centuries when violence was just something in stories and songs around the fire, and an evil something at that, the Ozarkers had forgotten what their native stubbornness would mean if it were put to violent purposes.
It meant nobody would ever yield. It meant nobody would ever give up, ever say, “All right, let’s stop before every last one of us is dead in this mess. All right—you can be the winner, if that’s what it takes to stop this!”
It would never happen. When only two Arkansawyers of different Kingdoms still remained alive on this land, they would be fighting hand to hand—with two rocks, if that was all they had left to fight with, as seemed likely. And it would be a fight to that death. It seemed sometimes that somebody ought to of remembered, when it started, what a war would be like when there could be no giving up ever ...but nobody had.
The Gentles had no doubt gone deep into the bowels of the earth; not one had been seen since the first day of the fighting. And if they simply waited there long enough, they would have Arkansaw back for their own again, what was left of it, without a single Ozarker to trouble them.
“I think I hear something,” whispered a boy at his side, crawling up close to whisper it in his ear. “Want I should go take a look?”
“You step outside this mine-mouth,” said Nicholas Andrew flatly, and right out loud, “and provided you did indeed hear something, you’ll be picked off before your beautiful blue eyes can blink twice.”
“Oh ... I thought I could get out there, quick-like, and scout around.”
Nicholas Andrew was so weary of explaining what two and two added up to, and explaining it to babes barely out of their diapers ... He drew a long breath, and tried to sound patient.
“Supposing you did hear something, son,” he said, “and supposing it was a human being and one fighting against us. Either he’ll stay where he is, which’ll do us no harm, or he’ll come out into the open where we can pick him off from here—which’ll do us no harm. If he made a noise, you can be sure the idea was to get one of us to come out and be picked off. Otherwise, he’d of kept quiet. You follow all that?”
“Yes, sir,” said the boy. “Yes, sir, I do. I expect I’m mighty ignorant.”
“I expect you’re mighty young,” said Nicholas Andrew. “Now get back inside where it’s safer.”
Ignorance. He thought about ignorance. His own military training had been composed of a speech made to a couple dozen like him. They’d all been told that war wasn’t much different from hunting, always excepting what the quarry was, and that they’d been picked for their natural qualities of leadership and their good health, and that they were expected to use their common sense. That had been the sum total of it.
At Castle Guthrie the state of despair was not quite so complete as it was out in the Wilderness Lands or at the other two Castles. Castle Guthrie had been richest to begin with; it was richest still, though its poverty was astonishing. And it had the two hostages, two living symbols that some real action had once been taken—Salem Sheridan Lewis the 43rd, and Halbreth Nicholas Smith the 12th, him as was husband to Diamond of Motley and Master of Motley Castle. Whether he would have stayed on as Master there after the Confederation of Continents was dissolved, or gone back to Smith Kingdom to join his kin, there’d not been time for anybody to find out. Before the issue could be resolved, he’d found himself hostage here; and might could be there were times when he was thankful for the curious chance of it. It would not of been easy for him to choose between his own household—his wife and his children—and his kin. Especially when his kin were known to out-Purdy the Purdys for stupidity.
Around the one fire they had burning in the Castle, the Guthries sat in Council. James John Guthrie the 17th, another threadbare King; Myrrh of Guthrie, his sixth cousin and his queen as well; Michael Stepforth Guthrie the 11th, Magician of Rank (for all that signified these days); three older sons and an odd cousin or two.
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 43rd, 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 instant! 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.