Ozark Fantasy - Twelve Fair Kingdoms Part 5

before us, and the devil take the consequences.

"Granny Golightly," I said, "I'll make a bargain with you, if you'll hush now."

"State it!""You spread the word for me," I said, "with a suitable story... some good reason why I did not go to Castle Smith. You know the conditions on a Quest-mere refusal of admittance to a location is no excuse. I need a plague, or a dragon, or a bomb, or whatever you like, I leave it to you. But something that will be sufficient to make by-pa.s.sing that Castle not a spoiling of my Quest! Something clearly and wholly beyond my control, you understand me?""I do," she said. "And I'll see to it.""Your word on it? And n.o.body else harmed, mind!""My word, given already," she said impatiently, "and done as it should be. I'll spread the story and it will be ample, and no edges

lopping over. My promise on it, Responsible of Bright.w.a.terl"

I stood up then, too, and it was like a congregation following the choir; they all followed the Granny and me and stood along with us, and the servingmaids moved in to clear away the tablestuff.

"Then I'll stay the night here, if you'll have me for supper, too," I said, "and then go on sometime tomorrow to Castle Airy. The matter of Castle Smith I'll leave to Granny Golightly, with my thanks."

"Make it good, Granny," said Una-the first time she'd spoken all

that time except to chide or cosset a child.

"Never you mind," said the old woman. "I've been a Granny a very long time now, I know my doings."

Maybe.Since she would cover my tracks for me, it made no difference if the guilty one was at Castle Smith; as had been plainly stated, I had not even needed to leave home to find out who that was. But the Smiths now... I'd seen Delldon Mallard Smith at meetings, and for sure had always found him a pompous bore, with an "uh... uh... uh..." for every other word out of his mouth. But I didn't know there was dry rot in his brain, which was how the Granny made it sound, and it was of course a credit to the Smith women that I didn't. If the men at the Castle were as foolish as Granny Golightly had said them to be, plain out and aloud in front of one and all, then there might be one or more of them fool enough to be mixed up in this somewhere, or to prove a weak link at an inconvenient moment.

It didn't matter, I decided. I felt quite confident about Granny Golightly's powers of invention. By the time I landed Sterling at Castle Airy some truly wondrous tale would have spread from one end of Ozark to the other to explain why I had not favored Castle Smith with a visit, and that was all that was of any present importance. The rest of it could wait till a later time.

I followed them into the Castle, looking forward to my room and a rest and a proper bathroom, and as a show of solidarity I scooped up a random baby from a low bench in the hall under a round window.

When in Clark...

CHAPTER FOUR.

Castle Clark did very well by me; a small formal supper for twenty-four interesting couples, and the young man provided for me able to discuss several other subjects besides Mules and the weather, and then a truly impressive breakfast on the Castle balcony with what appeared to be half the county invited, and both a Taleteller and a Ballad Singer laid on. I left happy; dulcimerless, but mighty well fed, and my traveling costume fresh from the attentions of Granny Golightly herself-who I'd wager had not bothered to wash or press it but confined her "work" to a Housekeeping Spell-and I went over the next step in my head as Sterling and I headed out.

Castle Airy sat at the southernmost tip of Oklahomah; like Castle Clark it overlooked the sea, but there was a great difference between the tender hills of Kingdom Clark's seacoast and the hulking sheer cliffs that Castle Airy sat on. Their lands had no beaches; you pulled a boat up into the sucking caves that pitted the lower borders of the looming seacliffs at your own peril. Between the borders of Clark and the lands paced off by Daniel Cantrell Airy the 9th and his five sons in 2127 lay a broad expanse of Wilderness. Technically speaking, it was at least a three-day flight from Castle to Castle, and considering the time involved it was going to be a piece of luck for me that I could by-pa.s.s the visit to Castle Smith after all. I had no intention whatsoever of spending three full days-much less four-in the air. According to the maps there was an isolated stretch of thick forest roughly mid-Wilderness; once I got beyond the area where people were likely to be around, I intended to SNAP straight to that spot and spend two of my days in a pleasant contemplation of the Wilderness, some long naps that I was badly in need of, and catching up an account book I had dutifully brought with me having to do with trade in supplies for magic and a good two months out of date. I could then fly in on the third day and join the Airys for supper, with all as it ought to of been, Nor need I stay at Castle Airy long; they were loyal there. They were as romantic... quaint, to put it frankly... in their loyalty to the Confederation as the Travellers were in their resistance to it. Held a Confederation Day every blessed year on December 12, with speeches and bands and bunting and whatnot, the only one of the Kingdoms to have such an innovation. Stamped the Confederation Seal all over everything, and flew its flag beside the flags of Airy and Ozark at the Castle gate. Any day now I expected them to begin opening souvenir stands or publis.h.i.+ng a Confederation Gazette.

Why they were like that, it was hard to say; if we knew why any Family developed as it did rather than in some other fas.h.i.+on, that would be knowledge. I'd put that a sight higher than any of the scientific discoveries that had earned their originators a Bestowing of land in the past ten years. Or past one hundred, for that matter.

I jumped suddenly as a squawker flew by me, drawing a bray of disgust from Sterling and scaring the squawker into a plunge that I thought for a minute might prove fatal to the ugly thing. It was a male, its blue-and-white-speckled comb rigid with terror and its raucous call twice the volume a female could muster. And I supposed it had lost its eggs, along with its way, or forgotten the difference between up and down, a.s.suming it ever had known it. It surely had no business being two hundred feet up in the air interfering with me and my Mule.

"Never mind the fool thing, Sterling," I said, and soothed her with a st.u.r.dy smack to the shoulder. "It's gone now, and if it doesn't kill itself it's headed back to the farm where it belongs."

The Mule snorted, reminding me of Granny Golightly, who I was well pleased to have behind me this fine morning, and I smacked her once more for good measure. What makes a Mule think a whack on the shoulder is a caress is a mystery, but it appears to be the way of it. Or perhaps they are sickened by lovepats, and look on the thumping as some kind of comradely, Muleworthy activity. Mules are the only creatures on Ozark that are capable of telepathic communication with a Magician but refuse to have anything to do with the process; their position appears to be that we should mind our own business and leave them to mind theirs, and they maintain that most effectively. You try mindspeech on a Mule-say to let it know there's a storm ahead and you'd appreciate it taking cover in a hurry-you'll get yourself a headache that'll last you three days. There are, among the Teaching Stories, two or three that have to do with young Magicians looking on this situation as a challenge and trying to force a Mule to mindspeech; they're gory, as Teaching Stories go. Myself, I leave the mind of the Mule strictly alone.

I stopped thinking about Mules and thought about landing, which was going to be possible fairly soon. I hadn't seen any sign of habitation now for a considerable time, and on Oklahomah there was mighty little to block your view once you got ten feet above the trees. I took one more look at the map to be sure I had my coordinates straight, waited twenty more minutes for good measure, and SNAPPED, to Sterling's great relief. The less of this formal travel the better, so far as she was concerned, and she didn't need to use her psibilities to make that plain. Her braying didn't become exactly musical-that would be overstating the case a tad-but it took on a definite tone of musical intention.

The land below us as the air rippled and cleared was so tangled that I pulled back up to give it another good look; I had no desire to land in a bramble thicket or some such. There was nothing down there but forest, big old trees with their branches all twined and knotted in one among the other and their roots humping out of the ground, and I was hard put to it to see a break where we could set down. It would be dark down there, for sure, and not a likely place to run into anybody, give it that. Then I saw the glint of water to my right, a middle-sized creek by the look of it from where I was, and I turned that way. We could head down above the water and make a landing slow to the bank, unless it was thickets all the way to the edge.

I had to try twice before we found a break in the undergrowth-no wonder nor Clarks, nor Smiths, nor Airys had cared to claim any of this stretch. It'd have to have diamonds under it to make it worth fooling with. I finally located a little bend in the creek where it eased back into a kind of tumble of boulders, several of them big enough for a Mule to stand on with a foot or two of s.p.a.ce to spare, and I brought Sterling down. Seeing as how I didn't want to slide into the water and ruin my clothes totally, I brought her to a full stop in the air first and then we stepped sedately onto the nearest flat place. She was good, but she couldn't land naturally with no room for a run-in.

And then I looked around me, and I was satisfied. There could of been forty people in those woods within ten feet and not one of us would of known the others existed, it was that tangled. Dark! My, but it was dark. We'd come down out of clear skies and a brisk wind and scudding little puffs of cloud, all bright and sparkling; down here it was pure gloom. Very satisfactory.

I had a microviewer with me, and six trashy novels on fiche that I couldn't of gotten away with taking time to read at home. I could feel my resolve to work on the account book fading away at the very look of this place; it was designed by its Creator for a good read if ever I saw a place that was, and the serious stuff could wait. I would settle in here in this back-of-nowhere and indulge myself while the chance lay there begging to be taken.

I pulled the smaller saddlebag off the Mule's back and set it down, careful it wouldn't slide, and set myself down beside it. The first step, even before I led Sterling down to drink (provided she waited for me to do that, which was not anything to lay bets on), was to change my clothes. I was just pulling off one of the last of my complicated garments when I got into trouble I hadn't antic.i.p.ated.

Whatever it was that had slapped me into that cold water had been big, and because I'd had my head covered up in swathes of lace and velvet I hadn't seen or heard or smelled it coming. I hoped I'd given the dratted clothes a hard enough pitch to keep them dry, but not hard enough to throw them into a bramblebush... or I'd be spending my planned period of self-indulgence manifesting a new set just like them, out here in the middle of nowhere, by magic, with nothing but my emergency kit and whatever happened to grow handy for makings.

On the rough principle that what had knocked me into the water was not a water creature itself, since it had been on the bank at the time, I dove for the bottom of the creek. It was murk down there, naturally, no nice clear ocean all pretty with water like a gemstone, but it seemed to be clean water, and flowing, and there were no deepwater weeds in my way to get caught in. And about the time I was congratulating myself on that, I discovered that I'd made a major mistake.

I'd never seen one before, but I recognized the shape of it well enough when I got my eyes open, even through the dark of the water and the stuff I'd stirred up going in. Only one thing on this planet goes with six legs and is the size of the shadow that twisted just ahead of me (I hope), and I was in sizable trouble. The cavecat can climb anything, and it can swim, and it lives to kill; four of the legs are for running, and the other two for slas.h.i.+ng and clawing, and the clawing involves eight three-inch razors to every paw. Not to mention its teeth, of which it has more than it needs by a goodly number.

There are not supposed to be giant cavecats on Oklahomah.

Kintucky, maybe, just maybe, though I'd never heard of one showing up there the past thirty years. But the way of things was supposed to be that cavecats had been wiped out everywhere except in the Tinaseeh Wilderness-where I was convinced the Travellers not only didn't try to get rid of them but encouraged them, just to keep everybody off. Nevertheless, this was not Tinaseeh, nor yet Kintucky, this was placid, long-settled Oklahomah, with its Wilderness not much more than a pocket hanky as Wildernesses go, and that was a giant cavecat in the water ahead of me. Right smack dab ahead of me. And I could see how, in this backwood tangle, the Family hunts might of missed a specimen or two.

I didn't know how well they swam, but I knew if it got to me it would drown me, even if it had to surface and just hold me under with its middle legs while it had all the air it wanted or needed. And I needed air badly, myself. The bottom was right there, and praise the Twelve Corners, it was rocky-I gave myself a hard shove off the cobbly rocks and shot toward the light, with the cat right behind me, and I scrambled out onto the bank and hollered for Sterling.

Mules. If she'd been there, where I'd left her not two minutes before, I might have been able to SNAP out of that particular hard place before the cat made it out of the water. She wasn't there, though, nor anywhere in sight. Gone looking for something edible, probably.

"Sterling, you d.a.m.n Mule, you, d.a.m.n your ears and your tail and your bony rump besides!" I shouted, and then I made the very close acquaintance of hundreds of pounds of soaking wet cavecat It pulled me in with one front paw and held me to its chest, which stank the way you'd expect wet cat to stink and then some, and started off across the rocks on the bank. Almost dainty, the way it picked its footing, and in no hurry atall. Like any cat, it intended to play with me awhile before it made its kill, and no doubt I was an unusual play-pretty for the nasty thing. If there'd been any people around here in a long, long time we would have known there were still cavecats on Oklahomah... and I made a note, as it carried me, that when I got back-if I got back-word had to be sent to the three Castles to clear them out.

It's amazing how much time a person has to think in a situation like that. Time stretches itself out in front of you, and everything goes to the slowest of all motions, and we went positively stately over those boulders and under arches of trees and through an a.s.sortment of bramble thickets. I was bleeding badly, and I was pretty cross, but I didn't intend to let either interfere with me staying alive. I relaxed, and let just enough blood fall to keep the cavecat's nostrils contented, and sort of cuddled back into its smelly wet embrace. And waited.

The problem was the selection of a suitable countermeasure. Common Sense magic would only get me killed-would of had me dead before this, considering the blood I ought to of been losing. The cavecat obviously did not know how frail the hides of humans were, nor that they could die from the loss of their body fluids before it had a chance to have its fun. Common Sense magic was not enough, nor Granny Magic. The question was, would Hifalutin Magic do it, or did I have to move clear on up to Formalisms & Transformations? (And make up your mind quick, Responsible, things may seem slow, but this animal is covering the ground at a smart pace and its cave cannot be much farther away!) I needed to be ready the instant it set me down and stretched out to bat me around between its front paws and watch my interesting attempts to get out of its reach-that instant.

I decided I was not expendable, and whatever firepower I had I'd best use it at its most potent. There was n.o.body around to see and wonder at a woman using that level of magic, and if there had been I would not have been in any mood to care. Formalisms & Transformations it would be, and all out-now which one? I was a mite short on equipment.

The cave smelled worse than the cavecat, which I wouldn't of thought possible in advance. Not that it was fouled-no cat does that, whatever its size-but it had lived there a long time, and it was a tom, and it had marked out all the limits of its territory with great care. It slouched in under a hole in the ground that I doubted I would of spotted as the entrance to anything, and it was suddenly darker than the inside of your head. Not a ray, not a mote, of light was there in that cave... I had the feeling it was small; no echoes, no water dripping. Just a hole in the ground, perhaps, and not a real cave such as we had flushed these creatures out of long ago on Marktwain. Real enough to die in, however, had I intended to die. Which I didn't.

It stretched out, long and lazy and reeking, and laid me down between its paws. And it stretched them out, hairy bladed bars on either side of me like a small cage of swords, and it gave me a gentle preliminary swipe with the right one, and batted me back the other way with the left one, to see me roll and hear me whimper. The Thirty-third Formalism was suitable, and I used it fast, doing it rather well if I do say so myself. Lacking gailherb, I used a strip of flesh from the inside of my upper arm to guarantee Coreference; lacking any elixir, I used my own blood to mark out the Structural Description and the desired Structural Change. Make do, my Granny Hazelbide always said; and I made do. It smarted. On the other hand, I would of been embarra.s.sed, dying in a place like this at the whim of a creature with five hundred pounds of brawn and maybe four, five ounces of brain. It would not have been fitting. When the cavecat lay purring quietly, content with the fat white pig it now thought was what it had caught originally (a.s.suming it thought at all), and which I had Subst.i.tuted for my own skinny white form, I gathered my battered self together and crawled on my stomach back out into what pa.s.sed in these parts for daylight. I found myself regretting very much that there was no way to do a single Formalism-let alone a Transformation-while being clutched to a cavecat's bosom. Like a Mule landing, I had needed a little s.p.a.ce, and I'd gotten mighty beat up before it became available. I was going to have a good night's work ahead of me cleaning up all this mess, and maybe longer. I looked like something blown through a door with rusty nails in it, and most a.s.suredly my appearance was not anything that would impress the Airys if they could see me now. Or before tomorrow morning, I rather expected.

"Botheration," I said, and hollered for Sterling one more time. She turned up at once, naturally, now that I didn't need her to save my life, and looked at me with the most Mulish distaste.

"Don't like my smell, do you?" I muttered. I didn't blame her; I

didn't like it either. "Let's get back to the water," I said, "and I'll do something about it."

I didn't know the coordinates, or even the general direction, and I

was too tired and too weak to SNAP even if I had known them. So I just followed her tail. I could count on her to take me back to where we'd landed, since she wouldn't be enjoying all these brambles and brush any more than I was. I wanted water, and the medicines in my emergency kit, and the denims I'd been about to put on when this adventure-

I stopped short, right there. I stopped, battered as I was, and the elaborateness with which I blistered the air all around me impressed even Sterling; her ears went flat back against her head.

"And plenty of adventures as you go along! That's required!" she'd said, had dear old Granny Golightly, and I'd ignored her and gone right on talking without so much as an acknowledgment that I'd heard her mention the matter. Nor had I thought of it since. If I hadn't been so young I'd of thought I was getting old.

This changed things.Sterling brayed at me, and I hushed her."Wait a minute now," I said. "Let me think."

There were but two possible readings. One, this had been an accident, no more, and my simplest course was to heal my wounds and settle and furbish myself to appear at Castle Airy as if I'd had

no hair disturbed on my head since I flew out from Castle Clark. Two-this was Granny Golightly's doing-and she had an amazing confidence in my abilities if it was, or an outright dislike for me- and I should somehow or other contrive to have myself rescued by somebody else... or whatever. Clear things up just enough to stand it, maybe, throw myself over the Mule's back at the proper time, and straggle into Castle Airy a victim just short of death.

Foof. I didn't know what to do. From Granny Golightly's perspective I'd been getting off easy; two Castles stopped at already, and not one adventure to show for my trouble yet-hardly the way that things were supposed to be laid out. Under the terms of the Constraints set on a Quest, its success was directly proportional to the number and the severity of the adventures encountered along the way, and Golightly might well have felt she had a duty to support me more than I might of cared to be supported. And if Granny's story explaining my by-pa.s.sing Castle Smith was a cave-cat mauling, and I showed up unmarked and spoiled it-there'd be trouble. But how was I to know?

Until Sterling and I made it out onto the bank of the creek again, me fretting all the way and her whuffing, and there, in the absolute middle of nowhere, naked and alone out on a bare gray boulder, sat a pale blue squawker egg. No nest, no squawker, no coop. No farmer. Just the egg. Granny Golightly was mean, but she wasn't careless; the question was neatly settled, and a few more points to her. I wondered just how far that one's range extended?

Well, it was dramatic, I'll say that for it. There I was at the gates of Airy before the eyes of their greeting party, clinging to Sterling's mane with one poor little gloved hand, my gorgeous velvets sodden with blood and my hair hanging loose below my waist in a tangle of brambles and weeds and dirt. I chose a spot that looked reasonably soft, pulled up the Mule weakly, moaned about a twenty-two-caliber moan, and slid off gracefully onto the ground at their feet in a bedraggled heap. If I'd been watching, I'm sure my heart would of ached for me.

They carried me into the Castle at full speed, shouting for the Grannys (the Twelve Corners help this poor Family, they had three of the five Grannys of Oklahomah under their roof!), and I allowed a faint "a cavecat... a huge one... back there..." to escape my lips before I surrendered consciousness completely. (Under no circ.u.mstances did I intend to undergo the ministrations of three Grannys in any other condition but unconsciousness.) I woke in a high bed in a high room, surrounded by burgundy curtains and hangings and draperies and quilts. The Travellers were addicted to black; with the Airys it was burgundy. And crimson for relief of the eye. There was a plaster on my chest, and another on my right thigh; a bowl of bitter herbs smoked on the wooden chest at the foot of my bed, and the taste in my mouth told me I'd been potioned as well.

I ran my tongue around my teeth, and sighed. Bitter-root and wild adderweed and sawgra.s.s. And wine, of course. Dark red burgundy wine. And something I couldn't identify and didn't know that I wanted to. Either none of the Grannys here held with modern notions, or the dominant one didn't. Phew.

"She's awake, Mother," a voice said softly, and I let my eyelids flutter wide and said the obligatory opening lines.

"Where am I? What-what happened to me?""You're in Castle Airy, child," said a voice-not the same one- "and you're lucky you're alive. We would of taken our oaths there were no cavecats left on this continent, but you managed to find one, coming through the Wilderness. Whatever possessed you to land in the Wilderness, Responsible of Bright.w.a.ter? Oklahomah's got open land in every direction if you needed to stop for a while... why the Wilderness?"

I had expected that one, and I was ready for it. "My Mule got taken sick all of a sudden," I said. "I hadn't any choice."

Time then for some more obligatories.

I struggled to a sitting position, against the hands of the three Grannys who rushed forward in their burgundy shawls to hold me back, and demanded news on the condition of my beloved steed.

"The creature is just fine, child," said the strongest one, pus.h.i.+ng me back into the pillows with no quarter given. "Not a mark on her, the cat was only interested in you. And I'll thank you not to flop around like a fish on a hook and undo all the work we've done repairing the effects of its interest!"

I sighed, but I knew my manners. I said a lengthy piece about my grat.i.tude and my appreciation, and swallowed another potion which differed from the earlier one only in being even nastier, and at last I found myself alone with only the three Grannys and the lady of the Castle and my obligations settled for the time being.

The lady was a widow, her husband killed in a boating accident years ago, which was the only reason the Castle had three Grannys. It was in fact a Castle almost entirely of women; every stray aunt or girlcousin on Oklahomah with poor prospects and not enough gumption to go out as a servant came here to shelter under the broad wings of Grannys Forthright, Flyswift, and Heatherknit. And over them all, the beautiful woman who sat at my side now, smiling down at me, Charity of Guthrie. A three she was, and she lived up to the number; in everything that Charity of Guthrie did, she succeeded, with a kind of careless ease, as if there was nothing to it at all. Her hair fell in two dark brown braids, shot with white, over her shoulders, and her sixty-odd years sat lightly on her as the braids. The Guthrie women wore remarkably well.

"Sweet Responsible," she said to me, "we are so happy you're here... and so sorry that your visit has to be like this! We had a dance planned in your honor tonight, and a hunt breakfast tomorrow morning, and a thing or two more besides; but obviously you must stay right here in this bed, and no commotions. I've already sent the word out that you'll be seeing n.o.body but us, and that only from where you lie. Poor child!"

The poor child was all worn out, and could see that even with an excessive pride in the skill of her Grannys this woman was not likely to believe her recovered from the attack of that cavecat overnight. Loss of blood. Loss of skin. Shock. Blow on the head. Being dragged along. Whatnot.

Since there was no help for it, I gave up and closed my eyes. I was going to see to it, one of these days, that Granny Golightly paid dearly for this delay, not to mention all the arithmetic she'd put me through working this out so that all parts of it came out right aerodynamically. Aerodynamicad.a.m.nably. Not to mention in addition the potions, which were beyond anything in my personal experience to date.

I slid down into sleep like a snake down a well, surrendering. Tomorrow would be soon enough to try to convince them that someone as young and strong as I was could not be kept down by a cavecat, or even by three Grannys...

CHAPTER FIVE.

The women at Castle Airy were anything but docile, and I was no match for them. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances I might of had at least a fighting chance, but I was not operating under ordinary circ.u.mstances; I was being the badly mauled victim of a cavecat attack, and I lost almost two precious days to that role. I would dearly of loved to make up the lost time on the crossing from Oklahomah to Arkansaw, but it would not do. The sea below me was not an open expanse with a rare bird and a rare rocktip to break it; it was the narrow s.h.i.+pping channel between the two continents, and about as deserted as your average small-town street. All up the Oklahomah coast and all the way across the channel I flew, at the regulation sixty-mile-an-hour airspeed for a Mule of Sterling's quality. It was proper, it was sedate, and it was maddening; it was a number well chosen, being five times a multiple of twelve, and the members of the Twelve Families found it rea.s.suring and appropriate, but it was not convenient.

Below me there were at all times not only the ponderous supply freighters, but a crowd of fis.h.i.+ng boats, tourboats, private recreation vehicles, and government vessels from a dozen different agencies. Near Arkansaw's southernmost coast I even saw a small golden s.h.i.+p with three sails of silver, a craft permitted only to a Magician of Rank. It didn't surprise me, it warmed my heart, for all it made me have to dawdle through the air. We Ozarkers, from the beginning of our history, even before we left Earth, had always had a kind of l.u.s.t for getting places by water. If an Ozark child could not afford a boat, that child would set anything afloat that it was strong enough to launch-an old log was a particular favorite, and half a dozen planks nailed together into an unreliable raft marked the traditional first step up from log-piloting. What was in some way surprising was that we had bothered with the Mules; it hadn't been a simple process. When the Twelve Families landed they found the Mules living wild on Marktwain in abundance, but much complicated breeding and fine-tuning had been required before they were brought to a size where a grown man would be willing to straddle one on solid ground, much less fly one. And the twelve-pa.s.senger tinlizzies we built in the central factory on the edge of Marktwain's desert were more than adequate for getting people over land distances as needed, as well as solving the problem of what to do with the most plentiful natural substance produced by our goats and pigs.

But the memories of Earth, Old Earth, were still strong, and we were a loyal, home-loving people. We hadn't been such fools as to take with us on The s.h.i.+p the mules of Earth, seeing as how using that limited s.p.a.ce for a sterile animal would of been stupid; but every Ozarker had always fancied the elegance of a team of well-trained mules... and the Mules were a good deal like them. Especially in the ears, which mattered, and in the brains, which mattered even more.

We had brought with us cattle and goats and pigs and chickens and a few high-cla.s.s hounds, but of all that carefully chosen lot only the pigs and goats had survived. Most of the other animals had died during the trip, and the few that made it to landing or were born on Ozark soon sickened, for no reason that anyone could understand, since we humans breathed the air of Ozark and ate its food and drank its water with no ill effects. And then to find the Mules! For all that they stood only four feet tall and had tails that dragged the ground, they looked like something of home, and we had set to breeding them for size, and we braided and looped their tails. And "discovered" that they could fly sixty miles an hour. In the one most essential way of all they differed from their Earth counterparts- they were not sterile.

The people on the boats below me waved, and I waved back, as I wound my way carefully above them, doing my best not to fly directly over any vessel. Sterling was well trained, but there were limits to her tolerance for the niceties, and I wanted no unsavory accidents to spoil the image I was trying so hard to establish.

It was well into afternoon when I began to head down toward the docks that crowded Arkansaw's southeastern coastline, and there was a chill in the air that made me appreciate my layers of clothing. The docks were crowded, almost jammed with people, some carrying on their ordinary daily business, and some no doubt there to gawk at me, and I decided that a landing would only mean another delay that I could not afford. I chose the largest group of people I could see that appeared to have no obvious reason for being on the docks, and dipped low over them, gripping Sterling hard to impress her with the importance of good behavior. My intention was to fly low enough-but not too low-exchange cheerful greetings in pa.s.sing as I flew by, and then get on with it. It was a simple enough maneuver, something that could be brought off by a middling quality Rent-a-Mule with a seven-year-old child on its back. I didn't want the people down there to think me uppity and standoffish, nor did I want to waste time, so I chose my moment and sailed gracefully down the air toward the waiting Arkansawyers- And crashed. Three Castles I'd visited now, without the slightest hint of that disturbance of flight that had made me suspicious in the first place. And now-not over a Wilderness where nothing could suffer but my stomach, not over a stretch of open ocean with the occasional freighter, but twenty feet up from a dockful of sight-seeing women and children-my Mule suddenly wobbled in the air like a squawker chick and smashed into the side of a storage shed on the edge of the dock. The last thought I had as I flew, quite independently, off her back, was that at least we hadn't hurt anybody, though from the screams you'd of thought them all seriously damaged. And then my head and a roof beam made sudden contact, and I stopped thinking about anything atall.

When I woke up, I knew where I was. No mistake about it. The Guthrie crest was carved into the foot of the bed I lay on, it hung on the wall of the room beyond the bed, little ones dangled from the curving brackets that held the lamps, and it was set in every one of the tiles that bordered the three big windows. Furthermore, the woman sitting bolt upright in a hard wooden chair at my right hand, where turning my head to look at her would put me nose-toshoulder with an embroidered Guthrie crest, not to mention more clouds of Guthrie hair, was no Granny. It was my maternal grandmother, Myrrh of Guthrie, and I was a.s.suredly under her roof and in her Castle.

They had taken off my boots and spurs, but my clothing showed no sign whatsoever of a trip through the air into the side of a dock shed, nor did my body. I wasn't likely to forget the thwack I'd hit that shed with, but I hadn't so much as a headache, nor a scratch on my lily white hand. Being as this was somewhat unlikely, I looked around for the Magician of Rank that had to be at the bottom of it "Greetings, Responsible of Bright.w.a.ter," he said, and I was filled with a sudden new respect for those who found my mother's physical configurations distracting. He had chocolate curls, and the flawless Guthrie skin and green eyes, and the curve of his lips made me think improper thoughts I hadn't known lurked in me. He was tall, and broad of shoulder, slim of waist and hip... and then there was the usual garb of his profession to be put in some kind of perspective. A Magician of Rank wears a pair of tight-fitting trousers over bare feet and sandals, and a square-cut tunic with full sleeves caught tight at the wrists, and a high-collared cape that flows in a sweep from his throat to one inch of the floor, thrown back in elegant folds over one shoulder to leave an arm free for ritual gestures. There'd never been a man that getup wasn't becoming to, and the fact that it was all in the Guthrie tricolor- deep blue, gold, and forest green-was certainly no disadvantage.

I shut my eyes hastily, as a measure of simple prudence; and he immediately checked my pulse, combining this medicinal gesture with a thoroughly nonmedical tracking of one strong finger along the most sensitive nerves of my wrist and inner arm. It was my intention not to s.h.i.+ver, but I lacked the necessary experience; and I

was glad I could not see the satisfied curl of those lips as he got precisely the response that he was after.