Ozark Trilogy 2: The Grand Jubilee (14 page)

Sure enough. The computers told her, as they’d have told her sooner if she’d had sense enough to ask. In the last six months there’d been a steady series of orders in from Castle Traveller. Herbs, they’d ordered, both healing and magic. Magic supplies in abundance. Bags of the holy sands from Marktwain’s desert, and flagons of the sacred water from its desert spring. Lengths of fine cloth needed for the ceremonies of the Magicians and the Magicians of Rank. Gold cloth for the sails permitted only to the small silver ships of the Magicians of Rank. Unguents and potions; musical instruments and bolts of velvet; silver horseshoes and silver daggers. And coarse salt, in huge amounts.

The list was too long to represent genuine need, and she ought to of seen it; but they’d been clever about it. A little here, a little there, and all of it scrambled to look like the ordinary orders of a busy Castle . . . Only when the computers had it neatly sorted and totaled could you see what they were up to. They’d been stockpiling, had the Travellers, hoarding all those items they might find themselves hard put to locate for a while if they didn’t have Brightwater to call upon.

The hypocrisy of it made Responsible’s mouth twitch. Independence! Oh, yes. Stand on your own feet, be boones, be true
men;
no more hiding behind the skirts of Brightwater. But first, be very sure you’ve bled Brightwater of all the necessities for that independence.

Castles Guthrie and Farson, on the other hand, that ought to have been doing the same thing, had put in nothing more than a few routine orders. They were so obsessed with the details of the fool wrangling going on on Arkansaw that they’d had no time to spare for the obvious. Responsible had no illusions that they would of refrained from hoarding on any kind of moral grounds.

She typed in rapid instructions; there would be no more deliveries of supplies to Tinaseeh, nothing else to Castle Traveller, that did not have her personal approval. She’d not have a legitimate need neglected, but neither would she allow Castle Traveller to strengthen their hands any further at Brightwater’s expense.

Noon passed, and still she worked, and the soft hiss as each filled sheet of pliofilm landed in the OUT slot on the comset never stopped; they were working right on through dinner, then, at the Hall. She kept grimly to her figures and her bits of data, refusing the temptation to take a look now and then at the words that might be on those sheets. There were only a few alternatives, and as her magic had truly told her, every one of them carried trouble with it. Should the Confederation stand, there would be trouble: the anti-Confederationists’ resentment would be greatly increased by their defeat, and by their public humiliation at the Jubilee. The plotting, the niggling attempts to undermine the assembly, the constant dragging of feet when action was needed, would go right on as they had all these years, disrupting the equilibrium of Ozark.

Should the Confederation fall, there would be trouble: twelve sovereign states to establish themselves, to construct alliances and formal relationships one with another-a way of life entirely new and untried. And then there was the possibility about which she could make no reliable prediction: the most militant of the antiConfederationists-say, the Travellers, the Farsons, and the Guthries-they might simply
secede.
That was also possible, if things did not go their way, and if the problem of saving face seemed to them heavier than the consequences of secession.

At which point she realized that her method of concentrating on her work and refusing to think about these things was to run them round and round her mind, thinking all the time, “I absolutely refuse to think about what will happen if . . .”

“Dozens!” she said out loud, and then, “Bloody oozing Dozens!” If there was a worse oath than that one, she didn’t know it; if there was any justice, she’d be struck dead here where she sat, and then she wouldn’t have to worry about any of it any longer. “As I sow, so shall I
reap?”
she demanded of the universe in general. “How about You doing a little reaping, now I’ve done so benastied much sowing?”

The small message bell on her comset rang then, a poor substitute for the bolt of lightning she was lusting after; there was a message for her. No doubt the Farsons wanted their rooms changed; they always did, whenever they came to visit, as a matter of principle.

She laid down her work, doing it little harm, since she’d been paying no real attention to what she was doing for the past half hour at least, and pushed the MESSAGE stud.

“Twelve Corners and Twelve Gates!” the thing squawked at her; she didn’t even recognize the voice. But the voice was prepared for that, which meant it had to be somebody accustomed to the vagaries of Brightwater’s low-budget communications equipment. “It’s Granny Hazelbide,” it went on. “You turn your comset on, missy, this minute-the Smiths have just demanded to be heard out of turn because, by their lights, they’ve already missed
several
turns-as if that was anybody’s fault but their own, but your uncle’s fallen for it-and from what I see before me, unless you look quick you’re going to miss something like you never imagined in all your borned days! And so am I if I tarry here any longer!”

TERMINATE, said the computer.

Responsible frowned; she had no desire to miss out on anything that had brought the Granny to that pitch of excitement, but the suggestion that anything the Smiths might say or do would be worth her time was one of the more dubious ideas she’d heard lately. A Granny tumbled over the balcony edge from leaning too close, a Junior Delegate gone berserk and racing up and down the center aisle-something like that might be interesting, but the Smiths? The Smiths were dullness raised to its utmost potential.

Nevertheless, if Granny Hazelbide thought there was something happening, it was likely there was, and Responsible hit the proper switches. And there stood Delldon Mallard Smith the 2nd, risen to give
his
speech on the subject of the motion to permanently dissolve the Confederation of Continents. And his brothers, all four of them, and all four eldest sons, standing in the row alongside him-to give him moral support, no doubt.

She scowled at his image-the man’d never said a word worth hearing in all the years of his life, if what people said of him was to be credited, and her own limited experience with him led her to believe that it was-and listened for a clue to what had had the Granny all in an uproar.

“-that I . . . uh . . . understand from the very depths of my
man
hood, the utmost recesses . . . uh . . . of my soul, the plea that my distinguished colleague from Tinaseeh has made to all of us and its . . . uh . . . its significance. It strikes a chord that resonates in
this
breast!” And he pounded on the breast in question to demonstrate the awesome sincerity of his feelings; Responsible snickered. “But we Smiths,” he went on, “we Smiths were not taken by surprise at Castle Traveller’s move, nor do we . . . uh . . . take it lightly . . . uh . . . lightly. Knowing, knowing I say, that it was sure to come at this Jubilee-my friends, it was long over
due!
-we turned our finest minds to what it must mean . . . for all of us. Not only for Castle Smith, but for every Castle on this planet. And what came to us, like a . . . uh . . .
revelation!
. . . was that since First Landing our people have been ignoring something of great importance.
Great
importance!” He paused dramatically, a great bulk in a swath of cloaks that must have been torment in the heat, and clasped his hands before him, leaning toward his audience.

“Think!” he said. “What
was
it that First Granny herself said, as she waded out of the waters of the Outward Deeps and set foot on this gentle land, one . . . uh . . . one thousand years ago? Every schoolchild knows the answer to that question! She saidshe
said:
`Glory be! The Kingdom’s come at last!’ The
Kingdom!
I tell you, my friends, my colleagues, gentle ladies, citizens all over this beautiful and bounteous . . . uh . . . planet-we have missed the significance of what First Granny said for
one thousand long years
! For that, that was a
Naming!
”

Responsible was glued to the set now, not because what he said was so fascinating but because for the life of her she could not see where it was going to lead. What
could
he be trying to get at?

“Now,” he said, clearly warming to his subject, “what is a Kingdom? Is it a piece of land? Is it a building? Is it a set of . . . uh . . . coordinates? That may well sound like a simpleminded question to . . . uh . . . some of you-but I ask you, I ask you to give it some serious thought. When one of our Grannys names a girlbaby Rose, we ask ourselves-what does that mean? We add up the values of those letters, and we look carefully and with respect at their . . . uh . . . total, and we ask ourselves-what is their
significance?
And we don’t call that simpleminded, for we know that Naming is serious . . . that the very . . . uh, the fabric of our lives depends upon Proper Naming! And when First Granny called this a Kingdom, what, we must ask ourselves-one thousand sorry years late!-what did she
mean?
”

As any fool knew, Responsible thought, tapping her fingernail impatiently against her front teeth, she meant that we’d finally reached a homeplace and that she was fervently grateful to be off The Ship and out of the water and once more have her feet on solid ground. So?

“I’m not going to
tell
you what she meant,” Delldon Mallard said, his voice heavy with layers and layers of dramatic emphasishe must have practiced, thought Responsible-”I’m going to
show
you!”

For a moment she lost sight of him, as the comcrews swung their cameras round the room and up toward the balcony to give their viewers a glimpse of what was happening. On the floor of the Hall, where Delldon Mallard stood with his four brothers in their places and the four eldest sons each at their father’s elbow, an Attendant rose at every one of them’s right hand, and waited at rigid attention. And up in the balcony, the Smith women were standing, each with a servingmaid at
her
right hand! Marygold of Purdy, wife of Delldon Mallard and Missus of their Castle; the wives of each of the three brothers, lined up beside Marygold in the back row; and Dorothy of Smith, eldest daughter of the Castle. All over the Hall, the Smiths and their staff were standing-to do what?

The cameras swung dizzyingly back again-the comcrews must have been flustered by the turn of events-and focused on the Master of Castle Smith. His face was the very picture of a man with grave thoughts on his mind, though Responsible doubted he’d ever had a truly grave thought, and he jerked his chin imperiously toward the Attendant that flanked him.

Responsible watched it; but she didn’t believe it. Even seeing it with her own eyes, she thought that last night’s labors, last night’s revels, and this day’s tedium had driven the last of her senses to distraction. It could not be that she was really seeing the Attendant lift away-with a flourish-the heavy cloak that covered his Master, to reveal beneath it yet another cloak; this one of purple velvet, sweeping from the high ruff at his throat all the way to the floor and trimmed all the way round its edges and its sleeves with a foot-wide border of snowy fur. Nor could she really be seeing the magnificent velvet outfit, all tucks and smocking and studding, beneath that purple cloak, or the-yes, dear heaven, it was a scepter-suddenly in his hand!

“You are seeing it,” she told herself sternly. “
Be
hold . . .”

From a carven box the Attendant took something else, and he placed it with laborious pomp upon his Master’s brow. A crown, beyond all question a crown. It shone under the lights the room required in the gloom of the rainy day, a heavy golden crown with a puffed insert of velvet and fur to match the cloak . . .

She began to believe it, and she sank right down on the floor to watch the spectacle as it was repeated all over the room at the Hall, flickering there on the screen. His brothers weren’t quite so splendid as Delldon Mallard, their heads were decked with coronets and they held no scepters; the sons, miniatures of the brothers except for an extra gewgaw or two on the costume of Delldon’s boy, looked miserable with both the heat and the attention. And up in the balcony, while every Granny clutched her knitting to her breast in shock, the servingmaids removed the outer cloaks of the Smith women and completed the final touches to
their
gaudy array.

“I give you,” bellowed Delldon Mallard Smith, “my brothersthe Dukes of Smith!” He swung his arm wide in a gesture of presentation, and the Attendant next to him ducked hastily, but not quite hastily enough. “I give you my son, the Crown Prince Jedroth Langford Smith the Ninth! My nephews, who will be Dukes one day, and now bear proudly the title of Baronet! I give you my wife and my consort, Queen Marygold of Purdy, Queen of my Kingdom!” And on and on down the list, ending with the Crown Princess, Her Gentle Highness Dorothy of Smith.

Dorothy, that had always been a pincher. Marygold of Purdy, that had never sent in an order totaled correctly in her life, even when it was for just one item. The Royal Family.

Delldon Mallard Smith wasn’t through, of course; that would of been too much to expect. “That,” he went on, giving the back of the seat ahead of him three solid thumps with his scepter and making everybody sitting there jump,
“that is
what a Kingdom is! It has a King! A Queen! All those things that properly . . . uh . . . belong to a Kingdom, it has those things! And when every Family of Ozark has fulfilled its responsibility to First Granny, when every Kingdom has its King and its Queen,
then
at long last we shall see an end to the tribulations that we have suffered these last ten centuries . . . For it was not the Confederation of Continents that brought our troubles upon us-begging your pardon, Delegate Traveller, but that is . . . uh . . . a misinterpretation. It was the failure, the failure to establish twelve
proper
Kingdoms as First Granny intended us to do!”