Part 14 (1/2)
”That makes no sense,” she said. ”I beg your pardon if I speak
sharply, but it makes no sense.””If,” I said, ”one thinks carefully of the Ozarkers-and no reason, the Twelve Corners granted, why your people should ever do anything of the kind-it does make sense. And no offense taken. First, no Ozarker lifts a hand against another, not since we left Earth; the only exception would be the occasional child, that must be taught it can't hit its playmate because there's a toy they both want at the same time, and the occasional drunken fool, that is promptly seen to and differs little from the child. I'd hazard that even among your people the young and the foolish must learn.”
”Granted,” she said.
”But what the dissenting Families want is not that one should be
superior to the rest, but that all should be equal, and no dominance. What they want, T'an K'ib, is isolation.””It is an absurdity.””No doubt,” I said reluctantly, my loyalty giving me a bit of trouble around the edges. ”Nevertheless-it is so.”
”There must be community,” she said, ”and this is a small planet.
What you describe is anarchy.”
I was reminded, a moment only, of Sharon of Clark... but there was
a difference. This was no child who faced me, prattling memorized cant from Granny School. This was a diplomat, high in the ranks of a people whose sophistication surpa.s.sed ours as Granny Gableframe's surpa.s.sed a babe's. She knew quite well what anarchy was, and she knew what went with it. No doubt her people had seen its effects a time or two in their long history. No doubt it meant, to her and to them, rape and pillage and murder, barbarian hordes pouring through the cavehomes and tearing out the ancient tunnels as they went She had no reason to believe an Ozarker un-governed would behave any differently.
”They want to go back to being boones,” I said, wis.h.i.+ng sadly that
there was some way to make her understand us-us aliens.
”It is not a concept that I know,” said T'an K'ib. ”The Teachers do not mention it”
”Nor is it a concept that will burden you unduly,” I told her. ”A very long time ago-by Earth reckoning-on the planet from which
my people came, there was a man whose name was Daniel Boone.
If he had a middle name, we have no record of it-I'm sorry. And it is written that whenever the time came that Daniel Boone could see the smoke of a neighbor's chimney from his own homeplace, those neighbors were too near, and he moved on.”
The Gentles lived in chambers carved beneath the earth, and it was said that they observed a stringent privacy of manner. But they lived crowded close as twin babes in a womb, and their families were not small. I doubted she would see much sense to the story of Daniel Boone.
She was silent and small, sitting there thinking over what I had said, and possessed of a kind of presence that much larger creatures might have envied. I wished that we could have been friends. I wished that I could have visited her-but the Gentles saw to it that none but a very small Ozarker child could enter the doors they set up. I would never know, unless I looked in a way that the treaties forbid me, what it was like inside the caves of the Gentles. And, I reminded myself sternly, it was none of my business to know.
”Responsible of Bright.w.a.ter?” she asked, finally.
”Yes, dear friend?”
”It may be that what you say is true, though it does not seem
reasonable.”
”To the best of my knowledge, it is true, however it sounds. And I believe my knowledge on this matter is reliable.””I see... I think I see.”I thought she would leave me then, but she sat quietly, not even a shape any longer since the moonlight had waned. Evidently
whatever this was, it was not over.
”Friend T'an K'ib,” I hazarded, ”do you want something else of me? You have only to ask.”
”Your guarantee.”
”Of no war? Consider it given. Of an end to mining beneath your bedchambers and your streets? Of course, I guarantee it; that it ever
happened was due only to carelessness, not to malice. When I speak to the Families guilty of that, they will be deeply ashamed.”
”No,” she said. She shook her head, and I heard the crystals in her
ears sound, softly. Little bells in the darkness. ”That is not all.””What, then?””Whatever it is that your people are about,” she said, ”however it may be, whether this desire to be a boone that you describe to me, or a feud, or a greater evil... Your guarantee, daughter of Bright.w.a.ter, that we Gentles will take no part in any of it! No part, however small! Not even by accident... as you say, by carelessness.”
Well, I never liked lying. I liked lying to a Gentle even less than I liked ordinary lying; since they did not lie, they were as vulnerable to it as they would have been to the kick of a boot. More so; the kick they could at least have seen coming. However, there are times when a person does what she must. I gave her her guarantee, all solemn and sealed and packaged in phrases that made me feel silly even to use them, and she went away as unheralded as she had come, leaving me to toss fretfully through the rest of that night. My conscience was raw in me.
What I hadn't dared tell her was that there was only one way that I could make my guarantees real. What her myths said I had in the way of power I did not know; her people had royalty, and perhaps the ancient rights that went with that. I had none.
I could do what she asked of me, yes. But only in one way. Only by setting wards of the strongest (and from her point of view, the foulest and most barbaric) magic known to me, around every cave and every burrow and every smallest sc.r.a.p of Wilderness her people inhabited. It was a flagrant violation of the treaties she had mentioned with every other breath; it was also the only way that what had to be done could be done. And at that it would have to wait till I was back at Castle Bright.w.a.ter and had all my laboratories and my Magicians at my disposal-and I had not told her that, either. I supposed she would tell her people there was to be no delay.
I knew perfectly well that she would rather have died, and all her kin with her, than be protected by the magic they so abhorred -by ”sorceries.” For sure, it would not be judged dyst'al. And I did not intend to be the person that shattered illusions that had lasted tens of thousands of years, or the person that ended up with the lives of such a people and their blood on her hands. It might be there was some other way out, something I should have thought of, but it did not come to my mind, and I was colder than I had ever been in my life; and I gathered what little of my wits I had left about me, and I lied.
CHAPTER TEN.
Castle Wommack sat high at the northwest corner of Kintucky, in a landscape of tangled trees and thick ground cover, steep hills and ragged cliffs and crags; only Tinaseeh was wilder, and not by much. The Castle was bigger than it needed to be, rambling along the edge of a bluff above a ravine at the bottom of which there surely flowed a river, though I couldn't see it from the air. I would of guessed it to be at least twice the size of Castle Bright.w.a.ter, and larger than any castle on Arkansaw, the Parsons' included. And I could understand why, though I might privately question the use of so much time and energy for a single structure. The natural stone it was built of was abundant-if they hadn't used it to build the Castle they'd of had to cart the stuff away and fill up ravines with it, after all. Every time I flew low to get a look at the land I saw stretches where boulders big as squawker coops were strewn around like so much carelessly flung salt, leaving the vegetation to grow over and around and in between the jutting stones as best it could... and I was not looking at the Wilderness Lands, mind you. This was the ”cleared” area of Kintucky.
Furthermore, even the size it was, Castle Wommack was dwarfed by the country round it, and looked like a doll's castle more than a proper human dwelling. No doubt they drew some comfort from its size through the long winters when the winds howled down those ravines and ripped up huge trees by the roots, to pile them in heaps against the bald faces of the bluffs. I could see the point to it It was four days' hard flying at regulation speed from Castle Purdy to Castle Wommack, and except for a brief stretch over the Ocean of Storms between the two continents I had not done any distance by SNAPPING. I was running out of anything to read, for one thing. And then this country was new to me, the Twelve Corners only knew when I might get back this way again, and I felt it behooved me to see all I could and note it well.