Part 14 (2/2)

Once I left the coast of Arkansaw and was beyond the s.h.i.+pping lanes, all the way over that vast country up almost to the edge of the town built around Castle Wommack, I saw nary a soul. There were farms-clearly very large farms, and why not?-spread out over the surface of the land. And every now and again I would see the telltale white line of a fence built of that same stone, running along the edge of a cleared field, or catch sight maybe of light glancing off solar collectors on a roof. But not until I actually neared Booneville, the capital (and only) city of Kintucky, not till I saw the Castle ahead of me, did I begin to see people. Kintucky had only been settled in 2339, just ten years before Tinaseeh, and the latest figures I had for the whole kingdom showed under seven thousand citizens living here. More than a third of those lived in or near Booneville itself.

They met me properly at the Castle, and made me welcome; Jacob Donahue Wommack the 23rd, a widower these past two years, and his five sons and seven daughters, and numerous wives and husbands. There was a band playing as I brought Sterling down on the roadway winding up to the Castle gates, and people lining both sides throwing flowers and waving bright banners. Seven Attendants in green and silver Wommack livery followed me up the ramp and through the gates. And where I could catch glimpses of the streets and buildings of the town I saw that they'd hung garlands everywhere there was something to hang a garland on. Booneville was decked out for full festival in my honor, and I was surprised; I supposed it must come of the loneliness out here, and so few occasions for any kind of partying. Considering the hasty excuses for celebrations thrown together along my way so far, it made me smile; I tried, without any success, to imagine my cousin Anne at Castle McDaniels going to all this trouble for me, or the stern Lewises even countenancing such a fuss.

The inner court of Castle Wommack, inside the gates, was the size of a respectable playing field; you could have raced Mules there without much inconvenience. And they had it set up for a fair, with long tables of food and drink, and strolling singers and dancers, and a whole play being put on on a stage that fit neatly into a far corner, and crowds of young people milling in their Sundy best. They led Sterling away to their stables and then turned their energies to entertaining me, with a dogged determination that was at first highly flattering. And then, after a while, it began to make me uneasy.

I was sitting on a low bench with Jacob Donahue and three of his daughters, watching twelve couples move through an elaborate circle dance done to the tune of dulcimer, guitar, and fiddle, finis.h.i.+ng my fourth mug of excellent dark ale and much too full from the food they'd been plying me with, when I finally realized that things were genuinely odd. True-they were celebrating my visit as no other Castle had even considered celebrating it, so far as I could tell. True-the sounds in the inner court, and those that floated in over the walls from the town, were all laughter and song and merrymaking and pleasure. But there was something strange... and then, all at once, I knew what it was.

The broad front of Castle Wommack, five stories high of pearly white stone, forming a great muleshoe shape around that court, had windows everywhere. I took time to count those on the first story alone, and there were forty of them; multiply that by five and you got roughly two hundred windows facing on this court, give or take a dozen for variations.

And every last blessed one of them was not only empty of the people I would of expected to see looking down on the fair and taking part from above us; it was closed tight as a tick, and shuttered.

I clapped politely for the circle dance as it drew to its close, and clapped again for the musicians, and took time to smile at a small boy that had decided he was a juggler and was doing three pieces of fruit considerable harm right under my nose. And then I stood up, brushed off my skirts, and said: ”I'll be going in now, ladies; Jacob Donahue Wommack.”

A daughter named Gilead, freckled and slender and twenty-odd, stood up with me. ”It's much pleasanter out here,” she said, ”and I can recommend the cake they're setting out down beside the stage; it's extra good lightcake, and you haven't had any of it yet, I don't believe.”

”The reason it's pleasanter out here,” I said, measuring my words to make them fall with proper force, ”is because whoever is in there”-I pointed to the front of the Castle proper-”is suffocating.”

”Daddy,” said Gilead of Wommack, ”I believe she's noticed.”

”That I have,” I snapped.

”My dear young woman,” Jacob Donahue began, but I cut him off

short.

”I'll be going in now,” I said. ”If you care to come with me, you're welcome; if you prefer to stay out here while your faces crack, pretending to be having fun, that's your privilege. Youall do just as

you like-but I am going inside and see what's back of your shutters.”

I looked at them again, row on row of heavy wooden eyes all shut

tight and black against the stone, and I shuddered. A good job they'd done of keeping me distracted, that I'd sat out here for near two hours and not seen that!

”We'll go with you, Responsible,” said Gilead, and the other two stood to join us. ”But most of these people are having fun, and I'm pleased that they are. It's a hard life here, and not much in the way of party times-don't let's spoil it for them.”

The false cheer dropped off Jacob Donahue like a scarf off a sloped shoulder as he stood up, slowly, and I could see that he was in fact wholly miserable.

”Like Gilead says,” he told me, ”we'll come along... but I'd be grateful if we do it without drawing any attention. I've no more

mind to spoil the others' day than my daughters have. You, girls, you see to it that Responsible is sort of tucked away among the rest of you, and don't act as if we were in any hurry to get anywhere.”

We strolled, therefore, over to the Castle and in through its front door. My feet were itching to run, as much from annoyance at my own thick head as anything else, but I did as Jacob Donahue bid, and -eventually-we were inside.

Inside, and the door closed behind us, and the silence of an empty church. Not one laugh, not one note of music, came through those shutters, which was no doubt the intention. The fair might as well of been back on Marktwain; it did not exist inside this Castle.

”Well, well, well,” I said, ”this is a pretty pa.s.s! What's happening here at Castle Wommack to account for this?” From the top of a stairway ahead of me a woman's voice called down, and I peered up in the dimness to see if I knew the face that went with it, but it was a stranger. She wore plain enough dress to suit even the Lewises, her hair was pulled back and tucked into a kerchief, and she carried a basin of steaming liquid in her hands.

”We've sickness here, young miss of Bright.w.a.ter,” she said in a bitter voice. ”That's what's 'happening' here! Mr. Wommack, there's another three taken with it just since you went out this morning, and I'm truly scared at the way Granny Goodweather looks... I don't know what to do for her, and the Magician says he doesn't either-what next, I ask you, Mr. Wommack? I'm at the end of my wits!”

”Your Granny is sick?” I asked. I was astonished. A Granny was human, of course, but it was their job to tend the sick, not lie among them. It was obligatory for a Granny to suffer from ”rheumatism,” that went with the territory, but I couldn't remember any Granny ever being really sick for more than an hour or two, or dying any other way than peacefully in her bed at an age well beyond one hundred years.

”Both of them, miss,” said the woman on the stairs. ”Granny Goodweather was taken first two days ago; and then yesterday Granny Copperdell as well... and they'd both been poorly, I'd remarked on that.”

I turned on the Wommacks behind me to demand of them exactly what they'd been doing about this-sick Grannys, indeed!- but one look was enough to close my mouth. They were Wommacks, that was all that was wrong with them; they'd of done nothing, or as near to nothing as couldn't be noticed.

The Purdys, now, were forever in some sort of mess, and usually by their own stupidity. But they did put some effort into their actions. (They would in fact have been better off if they'd learned to put in less; usually they got themselves so entangled and benastied that it took more effort to extricate them than it would of just keeping them out of it all from the beginning.) With the Wommacks, it was different They were capable people, and intelligent, and sensible. About most things, that is. So long as whatever obstacle faced the Wommacks couldn't be laid at the door of the famous Wommack bad luck, they just turned to and took care of things. Bad luck, though, the Wommack curse, the long burden of paying and paying for the Granny that had laid out the Improper Name... anything that seemed due to that, they just gave up on, on the principle that it was no use trying in such a situation. This, I gathered, was one of those situations.

I tucked up my skirts then and ran up the stairs toward the woman that still stood there, the water in her basin getting colder by the pa.s.sing minute, if it was water, and paid the family behind me no more mind.

”You're Castle staff?” I asked the laggard nurse, and she nodded.

”Your name, please.”

”Violet,” she said. ”Violet of Smith.”

”Very well, Violet of Smith-take me this instant to the sickroom,

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