The Ozark trilogy (62 page)

Should that happen, thought the father, he’d blind the babe with his own two thumbs before he’d let that be its first sight of the world ... the Holy One grant that it
not
happen.

Avalon of Wommack was well shielded from any lustful eyes. The Whipping Cloth hung foursquare from its hooks above her head to her bare feet, with only the narrow space cut away at the back to allow the Whip room. But it did nothing to shield her screams. Eustace Laddercane hoped they hurt the ears of the Magicians of Rank that stood one at each corner of the cloth, twelve inches between them and their pitiful victim.

The whipping itself, now—no man could have done that, though not one had courage enough to stop it. It was Granny Leeward of Castle Traveller, her that was the own mother of the Castle Master, that wielded the Long Whip.

She’d explained Avalon of Wommack’s grievous sins to them all carefully before she began the chastisement, looking all around her with those measuring eyes, counting. She knew precisely how many people should be there on the walkway that bordered the square, did the Granny. Ninety-one excused by the College of Deacons for illness near unto death, a sign of sure wickedness in those ninety and one; and seven hundred thirteen that left to be counted. Eustace Laddercane was certain that Granny Leeward was able to count each and every one of the seven hundred thirteen, and would have known if even one had been missing. They lined up by household and by height, the tallest at the back.

There still was not room for all of them within the Castle walls, and it had been necessary to lay out this whipping ground outside, burning away every last sprig and blade of growing life, grading it flat as the top of a table, anchoring down the board walkway that bordered it with spokes of ironwood hammered into chinks blasted out of the Tinaseeh rock. But that was changing. The people of Tinaseeh, they were dying with a terrifying speed, ten and twenty and more now in a single day ... soon they’d be able to take their Whipping Cloth inside one of the courtyards, right into Roebuck ... might could be soon they’d have ample space in the Castle Great Hall itself, and be hard put to it to find anybody left to whip.

Avalon of Wommack had sinned doubly. First she had sinned against the cause that bid the Chosen People of Tinaseeh repopulate this land, to replace the dying who by their very deaths had revealed the vileness of their souls. Avalon’s father had brought her home a husband, a man of seventeen, and Avalon not only had not welcomed her bridegroom tenderly and obediently as was expected of her, not only refused to go willingly to the marriage bed where this male twice her size and near twice her age might do her the favor of placing his seed in her womb—Avalon had tried to hide herself away. They had dragged her from a granary, half suffocated already on the grain and on her terror.
De
spite the fact, Granny Leeward had hammered the point home, that Avalon’s womb had been through two full cycles. And secondly, there was the additional fact that Avalon of Wommack was a Two, and a female whose name came to the numeral two was intended by destiny to be passive and submissive and weak. The girl had also sinned against her Naming.

That, the Granny had said, was the greater sin of the two. A young girl, modest and timid as was fully appropriate, might be leniently treated for fearing the wedding bed and the inevitable childbed that followed it. She might well of had only a token stroke or two of the Long Whip for that, provided she went then and did her duty ever after.

But to rebel against her Naming was not just to rebel against Jeremiah Thomas Traveller’s orders to marry and be fruitful, the orders of a mere man. It was rebellion against the path laid out for her by the Holy One; a fearsome evil, a defying of the divine law.

And so the number of lashes had been set at twice twelve. A memorable number. Eustace Laddercane remembered only one other unfortunate to earn so high a number as that, and that time it had been for stealing food from the common stores and gorging on it. And that time the Whip had fallen on the broad back of a man full grown.

The Long Whip whistled through the air—stroke seventeen. The Magicians of Rank put themselves to the trouble of calling out the number each time for the watchers, that they might not lose track and think that surely it had to be almost over.

At his side he felt a long shudder take his wife’s body, and he dared a quick look, sure it was the birth pains, but she knew his thought as soon as he did, and without turning her head she murmured to him not to take foolish chances, that she was all right. All right, she said, but for the whipping—

Avalon of Wommack did not scream again after the nineteenth stroke, but Granny Leeward took care not to leave the people wondering what was the point of laying five more strokes on a body already dead.

“Praise be,” said the Granny solemnly. “The household of this youngun can go tranquil to its beds this night. Avalon of Wommack has paid in full the debt of her wickedness, and she stands now in eternal bliss, smiling and singing at the right hand of the Holy One Almighty. Praise be!”

The Magicians of Rank raised their long shears as one man and cut the loops that held the Whipping Cloth to the hooks, and there was nothing then to see but a pile of bloody linen, very nearly flat, upon the stained ground.

Somebody’s child, walking the edge of hysteria, screamed out over and over: “Where did Avalon of Wommack go?
Where is she?
” And there was the ringing smack of a full blow across that child’s face as its mother moved desperately to offer up a penalty before the College of Deacons could prescribe one.

And Granny Leeward’s voice rose strong and sure—and why not, seeing as how she was little more than sixty and mighty young for a Granny—leading them in the hymn that had been chosen to end this particular whipping. It was seemly; its title was “Divine Pain, Willingly Endured.” Except that Avalon of Wommack had not been willing.

The members of the College of Deacons moved along the walkway, their arms folded gravely over their chests, watching and listening for any sign of somebody singing with anything less than righteous enthusiasm. It was, after all, an occasion for celebration, what with Avalon of Wommack’s eternal bliss and her family’s tranquility and all; and the College of Deacons was fully prepared to see to it that a suitable explanation was provided for anybody present that couldn’t understand that on their own.

The little ones sang their hearts out, and the older ones sighed and released their grips upon the small heads just a mite. The children knew already; sing, sing loud, and sing joyful. Make a joyful noise ... they knew. Or there’d be a smaller version of the Long Whip waiting at home, and the mother assigned a specific number of strokes to be laid on, by the Deacon that’d spotted the wavering voice. It made for hearty music.

Eustace Laddercane Traveller the 7
^th
believed, really believed, in the Holy One Almighty. And there had not been a whipping yet that he had not raised his own voice in the closing hymn, almost roaring out the words, waiting for the divine wrath to reach the limit of Its endurance and strike Granny Leeward dead before his eyes. It had not happened yet, but his faith that it would was a rock on which he stood, and a comfort to him in the nights when often he dreamed it was a child of his loins that cringed and screamed and twisted under the strokes of the Whip.

“It went well, to my mind,” said Nathan Overholt Traveller the 101
^st
. “No faintings, no foolishness, and no punishments to pass out afterward—all very satisfactory.”

The other three nodded, and agreed that it had gone well enough.

“Well enough, perhaps.” That was Feebus Timothy Traveller the 6
^th
, youngest of the Magicians of Rank on Tinaseeh. “But the child ought not to have died.”

The two Fanon brothers, Sheridan Pike the 28
^th
and Luke Nathaniel the 19
^th
, looked at each other. There were times when they wondered about Feebus Timothy, finding him a tad soft, wondering if there wasn’t a slight taint of Airy blood there somewhere to account for what came near at times to romantic notions. Times when they felt he’d profit from a stroke or two of the Long Whip himself. He sorely needed toughening up.

“There is no room on Tinaseeh for a disobedient child,” said Nathan Overholt harshly. “The subject is closed.”

“There was a time,” persisted Feebus Timothy, “when we could have saved her, any one of us, no matter how many lashes she had taken.”

“There was a time,” said Sheridan Pike reasonably, “when we could cause the Mules to fly and carry us on their backs, and a time when the winds and the rains and the tides obeyed us. And that was that time, and it is gone. We deal now with
this
time.”

The mention of the powers they had lost silenced them all. It was not something you got used to. Once you had been someone whose fingers could make a casual move or two and a cancer would shrivel and disappear inside the sick one’s body, leaving no trace behind. Once you had been someone that could SNAP through space, moving from the Wilderness Lands of Tinaseeh, across the vastness of the Oceans of Remembrances and of Storms, to land less than a second later in the courtyard of any of the twelve Castles of the planet Ozark. Once you had been someone who saw to it that the rain fell only when and where it was needed, and that the harvests were always bountiful, and that the snow fell only deep enough and often enough to be an amusement for the children and a change for their elders ... once.

Now, on the other hand, it was as Sheridan Pike had said. Now they had to deal with
this
time. Four Magicians of Rank, their titles as hollow as their stomachs and their gaunt faces, garbed in a black grown shiny with wear, and their only power now the power of fear. It was a painful comedown, for they had been truly mighty.

Luke Nathaniel Farson had been picking idly at his front teeth with his thumbnail, a maddening little noise in the silence; and then he stopped, just before they could demand for him to, and asked: “Do you suppose it’s true, that rumor about the Yallerhounds?”

“Luke Nathaniel!” Even Feebus Timothy got in on the outrage.

“I don’t know,” mused the other man. “They’re hungry. We’re hungry, here at the Castle ... think of the people in the town. A Yallerhound, or a giant cavecat, that’s a sizable quantity of meat. And though it’s true I can’t think of any of the men with strength enough left to take a cavecat, you know as well as I do that a boy of three could catch a Yallerhound. All you have to do is call the creature, and it will come to you.”

“Nobody,” said Sheridan Pike, “nobody at
all
, would eat a Yallerhound. They would starve first.”

“They will, then,” said Luke Nathaniel. “Those that haven’t already.”

“Change the subject,” ordered Sheridan Pike flatly. “Can’t any of you think of
something
that’s not intolerable to talk about? You’ve lost your magic powers, but I wasn’t aware that you’d lost your minds as well.”

“Well,” said Feebus Timothy, “we could discuss today’s scheduled urgent and significant meeting. That’s not intolerable, just useless, and silly, and stupid.”

“Your sarcasm is very little help, Cousin,” said Sheridan Pike.

“All right, then, I’ll ask seriously. What
is
on today’s agenda?”

“A discussion of the situation.”

“Again?” Feebus Timothy was serious now, serious and flabbergasted. “Whatever for? We have had nine hundred and ninety-nine ‘discussions of the situation’ and we have yet to arrive at a single— “

Sheridan Pike cut him off. “Jeremiah Thomas Traveller is Master of this Castle, master of the four of us, son of Granny Leeward, and representative of the Holy One upon this earth. If he says we are to discuss the situation yet one more time—or one hundred more times—then we will discuss it.”

Feebus Timothy snorted, “The only thing in all that that impresses
me
, Cousin, is the claim that he’s Leeward’s son.
That
I believe, it being a matter of record; and
that
I’m impressed by. As for the rest of it ... if you’ll pardon a phrase from the formspeech ... cowflop.”

“You talk a good line,” said Luke Nathaniel Farson. “But I have yet to see you do more than talk.”

Sheridan Pike moved smoothly to cover the charged silence, and observed that another discussion was not necessarily a waste of time.

“Each time we meet,” he said, “there is the possibility that we will hit upon something we have overlooked before, colleagues. Somewhere there is a clue to be found, if only we were wise enough to spot it.”

“The clue you seek,” retorted Feebus Timothy, “lies in pseudocoma on a narrow bed at Castle Brightwater. Where we put her, we wise Magicians of Rank, these sixteen months past.”

“Nonsense!”

“Not nonsense,” said Nathan Overholt, knowing he plowed ground already furrowed to exhaustion, but too tired to care, “not nonsense at all. Feebus Timothy is somewhat confused, and somewhat overdramatic, but the facts of the matter are obvious. While Responsible of Brightwater went about her interfering and infuriating business on this planet, we were truly Magicians, with the power of Formalisms & Transformations at our command. From the moment we laid her in pseudocoma on that bed my cousin refers to so poetically, our power began to wane ... and now it is gone. Entirely, completely, wholly gone.
Magic
is gone ... and on Tinaseeh we have no science. The question is:
why?
”

“We have no science because we never needed it,” said Sheridan Pike disgustedly. “Magic was a great deal faster than science ever hoped to be, and far more efficient.”