The Ozark trilogy (43 page)

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!”

An Ozarker hesitated to shoot at a sitting duck; but there was one careful question, put by a delegate with his eyes fixed on the ceiling above him and not on the man he addressed. He wondered, just wondered, why First Granny had never seen fit to
mention
this dreadful mistake.

It didn’t bother the King of Castle Smith. The whole thing having come to him in a dream, it all being a
revelation,
as he reminded them he had already stated, he knew the answer to that. “Just plain stubborn,” he said flatly. “She wouldn’t stoop, not First Granny! If we were such plain fools we couldn’t see it, why, we could . . . uh . . . just suffer the consequences. And we
have
-and we’ve deserved them every last one. It tears at the heart to think of it, First Granny sitting through all those long years waiting, waiting for . . . uh . . . somebody to see the light, and going to her grave with her wishes still denied her . . . It makes a man . . . it brings a man close to tears.” And he wiped ostentatiously at the corner of one eye with a bit of his white fur cuff.

Responsible would have given half her repertoire of Formalisms & Transformations at that moment for a chance to see the faces of the Grannys up in the balcony, listening to a pitiful fool make out the first of their number to have had less sense than
he
had.

There was more, but she was past hearing it. She had thought, she truly had thought that she had considered every possible alternative. But she had been sorely mistaken, for this had never crossed her mind. Not only had it not come in a dream, like a revelation, it had not even drifted through a nightmare! Why, even on Old Earth, even before the Twelve Families left it in disgust, there had been no more Kings and Queens that she knew of. Maybe somewhere in the backwaters of that dying world there’d been a relic monarchy or two, but for the true nations of Earth the days of royalty had been the days of fantasy and fairy tale-and that was one thousand years ago.

What would they do now, she wondered, not sure she really cared anymore; she couldn’t decide which word was more fitting“tragic” or “hilarious”-and her head felt entirely scrambled. This explained a number of things, all in a swoop. Why Granny Gableframe wasn’t here; no Granny would have countenanced such a charade. Why the Smiths had come late-to call even more attention to their foolish selves and their ridiculous plan, and to avoid the consequences of coming so unhandily late in the alphabet. Why the Smiths had so rudely shut their Castle doors to Responsible when it had been their turn to show her hospitality on her Quest-they’d been afraid that she would see something that would give their scheme away and lose them the advantage of surprise. Surprise they had, and no question about it. The loudest silence Responsible had ever heard lay over the Independence Room; she fancied she could hear that silence spreading out all the way to the Castle. And Delldon Mallard Smith, fool that he was, was not such a fool as to lose that advantage. While he faced no more than a pack of stunned and dumbfounded males, with the females above him helpless to interfere, he called out, “Mr. Chairman, I move we put the motion to a vote
now!
With no further delay!”

“Second!” bellowed the Dukes of Smith in chorus. And the Chair, her own uncle, in his own state of shock, quavered, “All in favor say aye,” and the ayes came out of mouths that no more knew what they were saying than if they’d been babes in the cradle-and the act was done.

And in the Smith row, where she’d not seen him before, Responsible saw the beaming face of Lincoln Parradyne Smith the 39th, Magician of Rank of Castle Smith. He was pleased, ah, he was
delighted;
he’d be dancing in the aisle any minute now. What had he done to Granny Gableframe, she thought, to keep her away, and keep her from warning Responsible that this monstrous thing was in the planning? If he’d harmed the old woman, Responsible would see that he paid . . . but he no doubt knew that. If there’d been any hazard he’d not of been grinning the way he was.