Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd was feeling reasonably content with his lot. He would have gone to some pains not to admit it, since the rest of the population was of a much different mind, but he found the current Spartan regime exactly to his taste. The rooms of Castle Wommack—all four hundred of them—had always given him a vague feeling of claustrophobia; he knew why now. It had been all that furniture. The massive benches lining every hall, and the huge tapestries behind them. The draperies that you could have easily made a tent for five or six people out of, with the green velvet with twelve inches of gold fringe ... and the occasional variety of gold velvet, with twelve inches of green fringe. The vases of flowers and the paintings in their heavy frames, and the thick carpets, all four hundred of them ... no, he took that back. There had never been carpets in the kitchens. Make it three hundred and ninety-seven carpets. He had been smothered by all that, but he hadn’t realized it; after all, in rooms thirty feet square, with fourteen-foot ceilings, the furnishings had been scattered around in a lot of empty space—as he recalled, there’d been a deliberate effort expressed by his cousin Gilead to keep the Castle’s decoration “spare.”
That had been her word, and he’d assumed it had some congruence with reality.
But now that it was all gone he realized that he could at last breathe freely. He liked the feel of the bare stone floors under his feet, and the look of the arched high windows open to the air and sky. He no longer felt that he had to go out and pace the balconies in the middle of the night, he was contented to pace his own almost empty room instead.
As for his once elegant wardrobe, now only a memory, and the diet of grains and root vegetables and ingeniously concocted soups that had replaced the roasts and stuffings and steaks and lavish desserts ... he had never cared about such things anyway.
And at the moment he had several specific things to be happy about. There was, for instance, the blissful ease of his mind. At first he had been like the man with a toothache that comes and goes, always braced for the next twinge out of nowhere. Now, enough time had gone by since the last intrusion from Responsible of Brightwater that he felt secure in his privacy. She had been a parasite coiled in his head, never mind how many hundreds of miles of physical space separated them, and he had lived in constant dread of the stirring of that ... thing ... within him; it was gone, praise the Twelve Gates and the Twelve Corners, forever.
And there was the fact that Thomas Lincoln Wommack the 9th was now Master of this Castle, and had lifted from Lewis Motley’s unwilling neck the burden of Guardianship that had chafed it so mightily since the death of Thomas Lincoln’s father. He had detested being Guardian, and everything that went with it—all that constant fiddling detail—and he was firmly determined that never again would he have to administer so much as a dollhouse, or be responsible for anything more than his own person. His sister Jewel had the Teaching Order that had replaced the old comset educational system well in hand, and showed a natural talent for administration that he recognized as invaluable. He didn’t even have to worry about that.
Bliss, basically. Impoverished bliss, perhaps, and a nagging concern for the problems of sickness and crop failures and the like that plagued Kintucky—but it had to be admitted that all of that was out of his hands and beyond his power to alter in any way. What he could do, he did; mostly, it amounted to encouraging Jewel of Wommack and her flock of Teachers in their efforts, all far more productive than his could have been. The ways they found to stretch supplies, and the things they thought of when there was pain to be eased ... He admired it, loudly and openly and enthusiastically. And he thanked the Powers that none of it required anything more of him personally than that unflagging enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, he could always produce.
Thinking about it, a bowl of hot oats and half a cup of milk comforting his stomach, he leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk, folded his arms behind his head, and sighed a long sigh of satisfaction.
At which point, his door flew open without so much as a warning knock, and he found himself facing a woman taller than he was, thinner than he was, and looking much the worse for wear, though it was clear she was beautiful underneath the scrapes and the grime. It took him only a couple of minutes to recognize Troublesome of Brightwater—there was only one woman on the planet who looked like she looked—and that was such a shock that he leaped to his feet and knocked his chair over in the process.
“Uhhhh ... Troublesome of Brightwater!” he managed, and bent to pick up the chair and set it right.
“As you live and breathe,” she said.
“Well, I know it wasn’t exactly a fanfare and a red carpet, Troublesome, but you took me by surprise. I thought you spent all your time on top of a mountain and never came down except for emergencies ... like clearing a pack of rats and weasels out of Confederation Hall, for example. Not to mention that however in the world you got here, all the way from Brightwater, is beyond me. Surely you didn’t expect me not to be surprised?”
“May I come in or not?” Troublesome demanded. “Finding you wasn’t easy, young man, and I’m sick of prowling your halls in search of your august presence.”
“Please do come in,” said Lewis Motley readily enough. “I’m ... well, no, I can’t say I’m delighted to see you. We’ll no doubt end by regretting that you dropped by, I’m aware of that. But I am most assuredly interested to see you ...Do come in, and sit down.”
Troublesome’s eyes flicked over the room, and she clucked her tongue in amazement.
“What is it?”
“All this furniture.” She stepped inside and closed the door behind her. “Brightwater’s got a rocker for the Grannys, and beds all around, and that’s about it. Everything else has gone for firewood long ago.”
“I was just thinking how bare it was. And how much I liked it bare.”
“A matter of your point of view, I expect,” said Troublesome. “It looks mighty grand to this pair of eyes.”
“You’re on Kintucky,” he reminded her. “How, I don’t know—we’ll come back to that. But on Kintucky we could burn fires day and night for a hundred years and we’d still only have cut down the undergrowth. If we could eat trees, we’d be well fed here.”
Troublesome reached for the offered chair, turned it backwards so she could lean her arms and chin on its back, and stared at him until he began to feel uncomfortable. And then it dawned on him why he felt that way, and he hollered till he got a servingmaid’s attention and told her to bring up some food and drink.
“Not that it’ll be much,” he warned her. “Bread, I expect. And coffee, if we’re lucky and Gilead’s set some by for the odd special occasion.”
“Considering it’s been near on two days since I’ve had anything but water ... and you do have glorious water on Kintucky, I meant to comment on that ... I’m not likely to complain. And the Mule I left in your stable was not the least bit ungrateful for what he was getting there.”
“The Mule,” mused Lewis Motley Wommack. “You came in by Mule, did you? Now, Troublesome, I don’t mean to seem to doubt your word, but— “
“Just from the coast,” she sighed. “One leg after another, solid on the ground. The rest of the trip was in a pathetic beerkeg that’s got the nerve to call itself a ship, and for which the only good word I’ve got to offer is that it didn’t sink on the way over here. No doubt it’ll make up for that oversight on the trip back, always providing it’ll still even be there when the Mule and I trek back down to the shore. No, Lewis Motley Wommack, I am not claiming I can get a Mule to fly; I had trouble enough getting it to move atall.”
“Well, it might have been that you could. Considering your reputation.”
Troublesome let that pass, and he went on.
“Will you tell me why you’re here and how you got here?” he insisted; he was rapidly running out of patience. “It’s about as likely as a goat playing a dulcimer, you know. I think I’m entitled to an explanation.”
“Passel of Grannys sent me,” said Troublesome. “They near killed themselves, poor old things, getting up Mount Troublesome to talk me into it and then back down again. And they used up everything they had left in this world to bribe the captain of that purely pathetic boat and his patheticker crew, and putting together supplies enough for this carry-on. The supplies they meant me to have while I rode the Mule here, those I left for bribe, along with a trinket or two, to keep my trusty friends from heading back to Brightwater and stranding me here. And the Holy One defend them if they do strand me ... if I have to swim back, I’ll find them, every last one of them, and they’ll rue the day they ever did any such a misbegotten trashy thing.”
“Oh, they’ll be there,” said Lewis Motley.
“You think so?”
“You put it very well,” he said, looking at the ceiling. “I doubt very much they’d care to have your lifelong vengeance on their coattails, Troublesome of Brightwater.”
“Let us hope you are right,” said Troublesome grimly. “For their sakes, and everybody else’s.”
“How does everybody else figure into it?” he asked, and she passed along the Grannys’ tale to him, while he sat there shaking his head. For a while it was his wonderment at the Grannys going to all this trouble and expense, and Troublesome going along with it, for no more motivation than some old tea leaves and a gold ring on a thread in a stray wind. And then when it began to be clear to him that it had to do with Responsible of Brightwater, it was his dis-ease at the position he was being put in. True, this was Responsible’s infamous sister; and true, if there was anything bodacious to do, she’d either done it or invented it. But there was such a thing as tattling, and there were certain kinds of tattling that were even more despicable than other kinds, and he felt like a skinnywiggler on a hot rock before she got to the end of it.
“Hmmmmm,” he said, by way of response, and fooled around with his beard some. And then “hmmmm” again.
Troublesome gave him a measuring glance, and cleared her throat. “If it’s your gallantry as is causing you pain, Lewis Motley, you can set that aside. The Grannys already told me Responsible lost her maidenhead during the Jubilee, and seeing as how you were there at the time and footloose, and seeing as how you are the most spectacular example of manflesh I ever laid eyes on, I do believe I can add up two and two and come out with four. And if I already know you were bedding my sister, we can perhaps just acknowledge that and move on to something more significant.”
Lewis Motley cleared his throat, and blessed the fates that had put this female on Brightwater and him clear across an ocean away from her.
“Well?” she asked him. “Does that simplify matters for you some?”
“It does,” he began, and was much gratified that the servingmaid came in just then with the bread and the coffee and gave him a chance to collect himself.
“Yes,” he said again, when he’d got his breath back. He took a drink of the coffee and made a face; it wasn’t much more than troubled water, weak the way they made it to stretch the last of the beans, and grain added in with a liberal hand. “That was abrupt, but it did ease my mind. I wouldn’t have felt justified in telling you that, but if you know it already we’ve cleared the air. Now what exactly is the question the Grannys think I know the answer to? Because I warn you, Troublesome of Brightwater—I doubt it.”
Over her shoulder he saw the flash of a long robe in the hall, through the door the servingmaid had left decently open instead of shut tight as she’d been shocked to find it, and he called out for his sister to join them. He knew the look of that robe, though he wasn’t aware it was exactly the color of his eyes, by a frayed place at the back of the hem that came from too many hours spent on Muleback. It would be useful to have his sister here as a buffer between himself and Troublesome, now the indelicate part of the conversation was past; furthermore, he enjoyed showing her off.
“Jewel!” he called to her. “We’ve got company—come see!”
“Company?” She stepped in the door, one hand on the sill, the long sweep of her sleeve falling almost to the floor. “Are you wasting my time with foolishness again, Lewis Motley?”
Troublesome gasped, and clapped both hands to her mouth, and through her fingers she said, “Jewel of Wommack, I declare I never in all this world would of known you!”
The grave eyes of a woman grown looked back at her, that had been a child’s eyes so short a time ago, calm, and possessed of a natural authority. The copper hair was hidden away completely under the wimple, and most of the face as well, but Jewel was all the more beautiful for the mystery the Teacher’s habit lent her. For the first time she could remember, Troublesome of Brightwater was uncomfortably aware that she herself could do with a change of clothes and a tidy-up.
“Troublesome of Brightwater,” said the Teacher, the first of all the Teachers. “I never thought to see you again, and now here you are ... What brings you here?”
“She’s just about to set me a question,” said her brother. “Sent here by the Grannys of Marktwain assembled, on a mountaintop no less, for that precise purpose. You sit down with us, sister mine, and have a cup of this terrible coffee, and if I can’t answer that question perhaps you can help me a tad.
“It has to do with Responsible of Brightwater,” he added, as if it were an afterthought of an afterthought, and he watched Jewel’s lashes drop to shield her eyes as she took the third chair and poured her coffee.
“The Grannys know full well,” said Troublesome, seeing no reason to waste time, “that the magic they were able to do was done on mighty puny power. But they were sure enough they were right to put this expedition of one together, and sure enough to convince me to try it. Jewel of Wommack, they are of the opinion that your brother knows how it came about that Responsible of Brightwater has been in a sleep like unto death these past two years. And if he knows that, they believe, it just might could be he’ll also know how she can be waked up.”
She looked at the man, in a silence so thick she could have stirred it with her coffee spoon, and then at his sister, and her heart sank.
“Ah, Dozens!” she said despairingly. “Dozens! You didn’t even know, did you? I can tell, just looking at you! Without the comsets, and Kintucky out here on the edge of nowhere, and no travelers anymore ... I suppose nobody on Kintucky knows. Ah, the waste of all this! Bloody Bleeding Dozens!”
Lewis Motley was so taken aback he couldn’t have spoken a word, or moved, but Jewel of Wommack reached over and took the other woman’s hand in both of hers.
“Tell us,” she said, in the voice that every Teacher was trained to use, or sent to do research and keep out of the classrooms if she couldn’t. It was a voice that could not be disobeyed because it left no possible space for disobedience.
“My sister,” said Troublesome, and because the exhaustion in her face frightened both the Wommacks, Lewis Motley shouted again for a servingmaid and demanded the last of their whiskey, “just into summertime, after the Jubilee, fell into a kind of sleep. Or a coma ... To look at her, you would think she was dead, but she has no sickness, and the name Veritas Truebreed Motley puts to it is pseudocoma. Just a sleep that does not end and cannot, so far as we’ve been able to tell, be ended. And since the day it began, everything has gone from bad to worse on Marktwain and Oklahomah; we hear there is war on Arkansaw. What may be going on in the rest of the world nobody knows ... or even if there is a rest of the world any longer. Since the trouble started with whatever happened to my sister, the Grannys are convinced that there’s a connection there—that if we could wake Responsible there would be hope for Ozark again. And they were certain—certain sure! —that Lewis Motley Wommack had the key to it ... Law, but they’re going to be in a state over this, and I don’t blame them, I don’t blame them one least bit!”
“Just a minute, Troublesome,” said Jewel.
“If Lewis Motley Wommack didn’t even know about this,” insisted Troublesome, “then the Grannys have made a mistake to end all mistakes, and a minute—nor a dozen minutes—won’t change that.”
The servingmaid came running with the whiskey, and Jewel poured it out with a level hand and passed Troublesome of Brightwater the glass.
“You drink that,” she said calmly. “And then, let’s us ask him. Before we decide to speak of mistakes and waste and the end of the world, let’s just ask him. Might could be he knows more man you think he knows, provided the questions are put to him properly.”
Lewis Motley had his whole face buried in his hands, and they could see the muscles of his arms straining under the cloth of his sleeves.
“Never mind throwing chairs, dear brother,” warned Jewel emphatically, keeping a wary eye on him. “This is not the time nor the place.”
“Curse them!”
The bellow shook the lamp hanging above their heads, and although neither Troublesome nor Jewel jumped, they both had to grip their chairs not to.
“Curse them all, the idiots! I never had any such thing in mind—they must all have been crazy! Oh, it I could only get my hands on them, it I could just— “
Troublesome looked at Jewel of Wommack. “He knows something,” she said, over the din. “He knows something after all.”
“He knows everything, from the sound of his conniption fit,” said Jewel coldly. “Now it’s just a matter of getting it out of him ... once he’s worn himself out. Talk of women having hysterics!”
“I’ve been a damned fool,” said her brother.
“Not for the first time, nor yet the hundred and first.”
“But this time is exceptional.”
“Then the sooner it’s admitted to, the sooner well know if it can be mended. I suggest you tell us what you’ve gone and done, Lewis Motley.”
“Can I have some of that whiskey?”
“You can not. That’s for medicine, and precious little we have left of it! There’s nothing wrong with you but temper, and if you haven’t died of temper before this you won’t die of it today. Just speak up.”
Lewis Motley sighed a long sigh, and began. “Your sister,” he said to Troublesome, “was causing me a good deal of ...misery.”
Troublesome was dumbfounded.
“Misery? In what way, causing you misery? She was clear back on Marktwain, you were all the way over here on Kintucky.”
“I hesitate to say it of her.”
“Say it!” commanded Troublesome.
“Your sister would not grant me privacy of mind,” he said then, and the words fell, quaint and formal, in the stillness of the room.
“Lewis Motley,” said Jewel simply, “you are either mocking us or you are stalling for time, and whichever one it is, it’s not to be borne.”
“No, I am not!” he protested. “Responsible of Brightwater mindspoke me” —she had gone far beyond just mindspeech, but he would not talk of that before two women, even to defend his actions— “every day, day after day after day, till I was nearly mad with it. I would be sitting working, I would be eating, I’d be seeing to a problem in the stables, I’d be talking as I am now, with one of the Family ... and suddenly she was there, in my mind.” He shuddered. “There’ve been many females that tried to tag along after me, but they had at least the decency to do it in the flesh, where a person could see them and have a fair chance at getting away. Not Responsible of Brightwater! Oh no—not that one.
“And so you did what?” Troublesome held her breath, waiting.
“I sent for the Magicians of Rank, and asked them all to come here on a matter concerning Miss Responsible of Brightwater, which they were willing enough to do, let me tell you; and I told them what she’d done—because she’d gone far, far past the bounds of decency—and I asked them to make her stop. That’s what I did. But not for the smallest wrinkle of time did I intend anything of the sort you’ve described to me, Troublesome. I meant them to reason with her, threaten her perhaps, set a small Spell on her ... just stop her unspeakable mucking about in my mind! Never did I mean them to hurt her ... Jewel, tell her. Little sister, explain to this woman that I never meant them to do her harm.”
Jewel of Wommack nodded, her eyes the color of river ice in late afternoon.
“He is mischief incarnate,” she said slowly, in grave agreement, “but he would not do anybody deliberate harm. He simply does not think—he never did. And now, because of his selfish temper, if the Grannys are right we have this dreadful time of trouble all to be laid at my brother’s feet. For all time. Congratulations, to the Wommack Curse!”
Troublesome gnawed at the end of her thick black braid, dust and leaves and all, a gesture Thorn of Guthrie had tried in vain to break her of.
“Lewis Motley Wommack,” she said carefully, “what did Responsible say to you when you asked her to stop it? Did she just refuse, say no, flat out with no explanation? That’s not like her ... not that any of it is like her ... but what did she say to you?”
The man’s face went cold and hard, and now it was Jewel’s turn to clap her hands to her mouth, because she suddenly understood, before the answer came.
“I never asked her,” he told them, voice like granite and a face to match. “She was in my mind; she knew how it repulsed me ... It would have been a very cold day in a truly hot place before I stooped to beg that vile little—before I stooped to ask Responsible of Brightwater to stop her foul behavior. Ask her, indeed—what do you think I am?”
Troublesome stood up and went over to a window, turned her back on him and on the Teacher, and stood staring out into the tangled woods beyond. She was shaking from head to foot, and her teeth gritted to keep them from chattering, in spite of the whiskey, and not until she had it under control did she turn round again, even through the spectacular bout of tongue lashing that Jewel of Wommack turned on Lewis Motley with. He had been told in baroque detail what an utter, despicable, pathetic, unspeakable, pigheaded, stupid, fool male he was, with elaborations and codas and emendations to spare, before Troublesome said another word. And when she did speak, her voice was hoarse with rage restrained.
“Lewis Motley Wommack,” she said, “I cannot explain this, and I shan’t try. I have no way of knowing the truth of it; I never knew even that Responsible had the skill of mindspeech. But I swear to you, and I know whereof I speak: my sister would never have knowingly done what you say she did. If she did it, she was bewitched, or mad, or anything else you fancy—but she would not have done that. Saving only Granny Graylady, there’s not an Ozarker alive more scrupulous about privacy than my sister. And you ... you never even asked her. You couldn’t stoop, to one small question. Lewis Motley, I would not be you and bear the burden of guilt that you will bear. Not for any power in this Universe.”
“I tell you— “ he began, but Jewel’s hand came down hard on his arm and silenced him.
“You’ve told us,” said Troublesome. “You’ve told us all I care to hear from you. You’ve answered the question I came to ask, and the Grannys were right. It took all the Magicians of Rank to put my sister to sleep, apparently; it will no doubt take all of them together now to wake her up. All of them; now when the ships are not running the oceans, and the Mules are not flying, and the Magicians of Rank are scattered to the four corners of the world ... four of them somewhere in the wilds of Tinaseeh, if they still breathe. And somehow, we will have to get them all together at Brightwater and have them undo this awful thing. And I’d best get on with it. The crew was half mutinous all the way here. Not a cloud came up they didn’t charge me with having caused it just by being on their leaky old rowboat. I’m not anxious to leave them waiting for me any longer on your coast.”
“I’ll ride with you,” said Lewis Motley at once. “I know the shortest ways—we’ll save time.”
Jewel of Wommack stood up, put one slender finger in her brother’s chest, and pushed. It was a measure of his state of mind that it brought him to a full stop; ordinarily, he was about as easy to stop as an earthquake.
“You will not,” she said flatly. “You’ve done enough. You’ve done so much more than enough already, my beloved brother, that your name will go down in history—be satisfied with that. You may well have destroyed an entire world for the sake of your pride—be satisfied with that. And I will ride with Troublesome of Brightwater to the coast to see if her ship has waited for her. And if it hasn’t, I will see to it that a way is found to get her home, if I must call in every man still able-bodied on Kintucky to turn his hand to shipbuilding “
“I would feel better if— “
“No doubt you would!” she cut him off. “I haven’t any interest in you feeling better. You have a lifetime ahead of you to spend trying to ease your guilt, but I’ll not help you! And besides that, they wouldn’t obey you, Lewis Motley. Not as they will me, if that proves needful.”
Lewis Motley closed his eyes and made no more objections. She was right. Not a man on Kintucky that would not, if a Teacher asked it of him, build a ship or a cathedral or a rocket or anything else she might demand. It had been planned that way, and it had gone according to plan; the Teachers were not just respected, they were reverenced. He could not command that sort of loyalty.
And then ... there was the way his head was whirling. It could not be true, but what if it were? What if Responsible had not known, really had not known, what she was doing to him? And he had not even given her the chance to stop?
He had seen it himself, it was what had led him to her bed, scrawny plucked creature that she was; there had been something special about her, and he had been determined to investigate it. Was it his curiosity, and his pride, that had made Ozark a wasteland ... and how many deaths lay at his door?
He could not have ridden to the coast, he realized, as the two women left the room and slammed its door behind them. He could not, at that moment, have risen from his chair.