Ozark Trilogy 2: The Grand Jubilee (28 page)

Choosing the color had been difficult. The Wommack colors were sea-green and gold, but neither of those had the solemn dramatic quality he was after. Finding a color not taken by any of the other eleven Families, now that the Smiths had added purple to their traditional silver and gold and brown, had seemed impossible. Black was surely dramatic and solemn enough, and the drawings of nuns after which the Grannys had modeled the costume showed that they had been black-but black was the mark of a Traveller. Lewis Motley would not have his Teachers in black. They had settled at last on a shade of blue; not the medium shade worn by the Guthries, nor yet the Lewis azure-but a deep, dark, vibrant blue that was exactly right, and belonged to no one.

The headdress, the wimple and coif that Jewel had dreaded the weight of, the Grannys had modified only a little from the drawings. They had made it one piece and all of the same blue; it showed only the face, coming straight across the forehead just below the hairline, and falling to a point at the waist in back. And round the neck, the only ornament; a medallion with the Wommack crest, on a leather thong.

There was nobody cared to point out to him that the color of the habits was exactly the color of his eyes. And no one of the women would have mentioned to him how the cut of the gown was the same as a woman wore that achieved the rank of Magician; it was, after all, a very different cloth, and it was not subject to the requirement that it be possible to draw it without hindrance through a gold ring that fit the woman’s smallest finger. The women held their peace.

Already the first habit had been sewn up. He had trusted that task only to Gilead, whose fingers were famous for their skill with the needle. A ceremony had been put together-not hastily, either, for he’d done it himself, and he’d weighed every syllable and every gesture-and Jewel had donned the habit and the headdress and dedicated her life forever to the service of the Order. She rode out on Kintucky now, with the Attendants and servingmaid, the Mules walking every inch of the journey so that the people could see them pass by in search of other learned virgins, and she would bring them back to him at Castle Wommack.

The plans for the wing where the Order would be housed were before him, and he meant them to have his full attention. Until a few moments ago they had had it. But now he shook his head in that gesture the Grannys and Jewel noticed more and more often lately, and cursed bitterly, lengthily, obscenely, pounding his fist upon the surface of his desk till the knuckles bled.

Damn
her,
curse
her, oh, the devils all take her and torture her, why could she not have the decency to stay out of his
mind?
Within him, something squirmed, and he was sick with a more than physical nausea; he knew now what the price of a witch’s virginity was, without asking. The question he could not answer was how long it had to go on being paid, and whether he would ever be free again.

He was an Ozarker; violence was something foreign to him. When he used his great physical strength he did it without violence, because it was a force that happened to be needed at that time and place. But so tortured was he now by this woman he had thought to make a pastime of . . . if he could have reached her at that moment, he would have killed her with his two bare hands.

If she could be killed. Could she? He did not know even that, and he laid his forehead on his arms and wept with rage and the despair of utter frustration. He might as well of wished to rid himself of his heart! No-that at least he could have torn from his breast. He did not know where the place that Responsible of Brightwater befouled within him
was.

Responsible stood quietly in the darkness, alert for any sounds that might mean someone had seen her SNAP out of nowhere and would be coming along to demand an explanation.

It wasn’t likely; she stood in a tangle of trees and briars so thick she could not see her hand when she held it up before her eyes, and in her dark cloak and boots she would be invisible unless somebody stood almost within touching distance. Still, this was no time to take chances.

Nothing but nightbirds, used to her now and gone back to their singing, and something making a soft croak in a tiny creek that was running behind her just within hearing. And that was as it should be; there was no honest reason for anybody to be lying out here in the Wilderness Lands of Arkansaw in the middle of the night. The only possibility was a party of hunters-not probable in a tangle like this, it’d make a poor campsite-or the one thing she really feared, a Gentle standing watch. Not that she knew whether they stood watch or not! Ethics, that eternal millstone round her neck; not to interfere, as promised by the treaties, meant not to observe, either; and so she knew almost nothing about the people whose peace and tranquillity she had come to preserve. It was not an ideal situation in which to work, and she considered, briefly, the idea of using a Spell of Invisibility as a means of making certain that the ignorance stayed mutual.

No, she decided. Spells were not a part of Formalisms & Transformations, they fell into Granny Magic, and mixing levels was a sure way to get into a mess. She’d just be
powerfully
cautious.

Her eyes were getting used to the darkness now, as far as that was possible in this tomb of branches and thorns and roots, and she unrolled the pliofilm map, no bigger than her palm, that she was carrying in the left-hand pocket of her cloak. It showed all of Arkansaw, but that didn’t concern her; the part that interested Responsible was the part that glowed dimly, barely above the level of darkness. A line, running round and bordering off the Wilderness Lands; and then eleven tiny
x’
s, marking each of the entrances to the territory that was the rightful domain of the Gentles. She must ward each and every one of those entrances.

Technically, she could of done it by Coreference alone, working with the tiny map. But equally technically, it shouldn’t have been required at all. The Gentles should have been safe from the Families for all time, just because they were Ozarkers, and their word pledged. Just because of
privacy.
The Gentle T’an K’ib, coming to Responsible in the night to present her complaints, had not felt that to be any guarantee of the security of her people.

No, she would ward each entrance on the actual spot it held on the surface of the land, all eleven one at a time, SNAPPING from the first to the last. And it was time she began. The Twelve Gates grant she did not land right on top of some Gentle, out doing whatever it was that Gentles might do in the darkness, or find herself sharing a bedroll with an astonished hunter. Accuracy was not going to be a simple matter in this murk and with the limited information she had available.

Three hours it took her, moving from
x
to
x
, carefully, silently, until she had completed the circle and stood at the first one once again. Now each of the entrances was marked by the asterisk that means FORBIDDEN, laid in six overlapping lines of the holy sands. Three lines of white sand, three lines of ebony, alternating to form the six-pointed star, so: *. That should cause any ordinary citizen, happening to approach an entrance either accidentally or deliberately, to feel a sudden disinclination to move one step closer that could not be overcome by any effort of will.

And then, against not the ordinary citizen but some Magician or Magician of Rank bent upon mischief, or made curious by the repelling effect of the asterisk, she had set yet another ward at each-the double-barred arrow of the Transformations, slashed through with a diagonal line. Golden sand for the arrow; silver sand for the slash that said THE TRANSFORMATION DOES NOT APPLY and would keep anybody skilled in magic from removing her asterisks by a Deletion Transformation.

Over all the devices of sand she had poured sacred water from the flagons, so that they sank into the earth and could no longer be seen, but were bound there irrevocably by the power of the waters. Perhaps the Out-Cabal had ways of undoing such a warding-they claimed to have, bragging and threatening through the Mules, calling the Ozark magic bungling and primitive. But it was not against the Out-Cabal that she had promised to protect the Gentles, and no Ozarker, whatever his or her level of skill at magic, could undo what she had done. And nobody had seen or heard her, neither human nor Gentle. If the small people, down in their caves, had somehow heard her moving about and were to come up in the dawn to investigate the sound, they would find nothing; there would be nothing to see, nothing to sense. The wards were set
for
them; they would not be affected by their presence in the earth.

She tried to think; had she forgotten anything? There was a last step, but once it was done she would no longer have the power to make changes if anything had been neglected.

She checked it off on her fingers. Eleven entrances, eleven asterisks, eleven signs that said FORBIDDEN. Eleven entrances, eleven slashed arrows, eleven signs that said THE TRANSFORMATION DOES NOT APPLY. Twenty-two signs; water from the sacred desert spring poured over every sandgrain that formed them, the whole branded into the land. She could not see what else there could be to do, and she was tired; when she had first planned this, she had never considered that she’d have it all to do by herself alone. She’d thought a few of the Magicians of Rank would be with her, giving her aid, making it a minor effort.

That was before the discovery that a Magician of Rank could turn his magic against a Granny. It was natural that they should attack her, Responsible of Brightwater, they had reason to hate her-but harm a Granny? It was unthinkable, it was a tear in the fabric of magic, and she trusted them no longer. And she was weary, weary . . . which was no excuse for carelessness. Deliberately, she pinched the sensitive skin at the base of her thumb till she was certain beyond question that she was alert.

And then she moved to the final act that would complete her task and some left over. One flagon of water she still had, one small shammybag of sand all of silver. Carefully she prepared her Structural Index, using the little map with its glowing border and its eleven
x
points. Scrupulously, she prepared the Structural Change, specifying all eleven points of Coreference rigorously. The sharp point of her silver dagger cut it all into the earth at her feet, laid bare of its layer of thick leaves and protesting tiny crawlers and wigglers. In the glow of the map she made sure there was no character of the formal orthography not cut clean and clear and deep. The weariness moved over her in sluggish waves as she worked, and she knew there would be no SNAPPING back to her room until she had rested. She would be lucky if she had strength enough to get her over the water and onto Brightwater land, under some convenient bush that would hide her while she slept a little while.

Responsible of Brightwater stood then, and traced the doublebarred arrow in the air, where it hung, quivering and golden, throbbing with its stored energy held back only by her skill, between her two hands.

“There!” she whispered, and released it.

It was a Movement Transformation; the arrow sped straight for the line that bordered the Gentles’ holdings and raced round its perimeter in a blinding streak of gold, faster than the eye could follow it, out of her sight. She knew where it was going, though she could no longer watch its progress; a few seconds later she saw it again, coming back, and it plunged to the ground at her feet and winked out in the darkness.

Now, it was done. Well and truly done. Not only had she warded the entrances themselves, so that no Ozarker would be capable of passing them, but she had linked the wards one to another to make of them a
ring
of wards. If that was not invulnerable, if it did not represent a full keeping of her promise to T’an K’ib, then doing so was beyond any skill known to Ozark. It
should
be invulnerable, and no way for any Gentle ever to know that what guarded them was the magic they so abhorred. There was nothing left to give the secret away, and there was no living soul that knew what she had done, to tell them. It was done, over, accomplished.

If all her blood had been drawn from her veins she could not have been more weak, but she must get safely off Arkansaw before she let herself rest. She was aware that she shivered in the warm summer night and that she had bitten nearly through her lower lip, forcing herself not to fall, not to close her eyes.

She SNAPPED, sorry now she had not brought a Mule, clearing the coast of Marktwain but not reaching the borders of Brightwater, and fell unconscious in a patch of brush back of a goatbarn somewhere inside McDaniels Kingdom. She was past caring if the farmer found her there before she woke.

The Magicians of Rank SNAPPED in one by one on their Mules, even the four from Castle Traveller, not more than half a dozen minutes apart. They made a spectacle in the courtyard of Castle Wommack in their elaborate robes of office; and the nine Mules were not your average Mule. The stablemen that led the animals off to be rubbed down and watered and fed did so with a wary eye and a delicate touch. Feisty creatures these were, and accustomed to special treatment,
in
cluding a ration of dark ale with their grain. Treated with anything less than the respect they considered their due, they’d been known to kick an unwary staffer right out a stable door with one contemptuous stroke of a back hoof. The men circled them gingerly, doing their best to stay out of range while at the same time accomplishing all the necessary attentions. The fact that the Mules were obviously hugely amused by it all didn’t make it any easier.

When it was all over, and everybody safely out of the stables, the men had much to say about animals getting above theirselves, and how a whack with a two-by-four right between the ears would of done this or that one a lot of good-but they waited till the Mules were safely stalled and the stable a hundred yards behind them before they let any such talk escape them.