“Still, if the farmers become the next casualties of war, they’re not going to be able to enjoy their wheat rolls. So why stay and guard their useless harvest? They should get out of the way while they can.”
“Maybe they’ve had enough of life. Maybe they’ve had their share.”
“Who has had enough of life?” she said.
“You did,” he answered. “You laid yourself down to die.”
“I laid myself down to go,” she corrected him, but then she began to cry. He assumed she didn’t really know what she meant. It must be no fun being an oracle for everyone else and being clueless about yourself.
Before they could return to their chairs to continue, a bell rang in the mauntery. The glass cat slept on. “It is time for prayers before dinner,” said Yackle. “Shall we take a break now?”
“You’re going to pray?” he asked.
“I remember the old ways of this place. I’m going to find a cleaver and trim these pesky nails, for one thing. Then I’m going to sit in a chapel among people who pray,” she replied. “You may have a writ from the Emerald City, but I suspect it doesn’t require me to reveal the metes and bounds of my religious doubt.”
He shrugged again. “Will you join me?” she said, aggressively.
“We have hardly started,” he said. “You’ve told me about meeting the Nanny, and how you came to learn about the Thropps. That’s just scratching the surface. Tell me something more about that Elphaba—the Wicked Witch—before you go. For all I know you’ll be assumed bodily into the Afterlife at the end of prayers tonight.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” she replied and headed for the door.
Then she turned. “The Nanny had come for advice about her employer, about that Melena Thropp—the mother of Elphaba and, eventually, the mother of Nessarose and our current benighted Emperor of Oz, Shell, too. I supplied her with something, some pinlobble leaves cut with milkflower or something. I don’t even remember. Useful, though hardly magical. I never met Melena or her husband the minister. I never met Nessarose or Shell. And that Elphaba—that green girl!—well, we know what happened to her. I was on hand for bits and pieces of that, too.”
“Go on,” he said.
“I’m out of here,” she said, scraping her hand in the air, hunting for the doorknob. “But don’t you see what I’m saying? I had had my first genuine vision, even if it was induced. Something about possibility. All that misty apprehension, those swirls of image trying to form into something intelligible…in all that, I perceived force and hope alike. And I saw that I would be a real oracle, whatever kind of oracle I could manage to be. My calling wasn’t just a joke.”
“Elphaba’s tools of the trade,” he urged her. “The broom. The crystal ball. And wasn’t there a book, some book of magic?”
She wasn’t taking the bait. “The elixir had awakened in me the potential to read for meaning. I would read for meaning. It’s as simple as that. You see, I had been waiting for something to focus my attention. I needed to find something in order to sense a meaning to my life, in this earthly prison of Oz. Maybe I was like the orphan duckling who has to find a friendly dog or a hen or something that might serve as a surrogate mother.”
“Take it from me,” said Brrr, “not everyone who is devoid of a mother seeks out a surrogate.”
“Tell it to the judge,” she replied and left the room.
Like many a blind person, her spatial memory seemed keen. She creaked and tottered away toward the chapel. He listened to the hem of her winding sheet whispering along the floorboards.
It would be fun to hear the scream of some young novice who hadn’t yet heard the news that Yackle had risen from the nearly dead. All he could hear, though, was the arpeggios of melody in the oakhair trees.
NOT MANY MILES to the south, on the banks of the Vinkus River, a stand of young deciduous trees grew fairly close together. A forest fire some eight or ten years earlier had leveled the foliage, so what had sprung up in the ashes was of first growth, and all roughly the same height. Had Brrr possessed a spyglass, and had he thought to train his eyes in that direction, he might have caught a glimpse of a strange and troubled head swimming above the tips of the adolescent trees. It had ears like a dragon, and eyes like a dragon, but its tread was continuous, more like a serpent dragging its huge tail than like a quadruped galumphing along. But Brrr had no such spyglass.
• 6 •
T HE CLOCK was moving rather slowly; the lads who pushed and pulled it were struggling across the terrain. It felt as if they were hauling the wagon over a series of railway ties without the benefit of steel runner rails, since the ground was fretted with half-submerged roots of oakhair trees.
The dwarf and his new recruit walked ahead, picking out the best route. They would need to stop before long, as the sky was paling.
“We shall want to take special care, Lady Lucky,” said Mr. Boss. “Usually we like to sidestep troublesome neighborhoods, but our advice this time is to thread our way among contentious populations of nasty, armed men. Reach a safe haven just between them—a tall stone house where custom requires we be granted sanctuary.”
“Sanctuary comes at a cost, however hidden,” she replied.
“Oh, our private Missy Prissy condescends to comment!” The dwarf skipped in place. His mockery was affectionate, but it knew no restraints. “Do tell, darling.”
“I mean nothing by it. Just—just that no rescue comes free.”
“You’re sulky, you’re surly, because we impressed you into service after we saved you from that dolorous tower. That’s the thanks we get. My feelings are hurt.”
She shrugged. Perhaps she did mean that. Some weeks ago, in her life before now, her aging employer had locked her in the top floor of a stone turret. She’d been retained as a nurse, but he wanted more than medical care, and she had refused to yield to his advances. (Well, she couldn’t even if she’d wanted.)
He had gloated at her from below, by turns cajoling and threatening, until one morning, when a grape had become lodged in his windpipe. She couldn’t throw herself out the high window to revive him; the drop was too steep. She couldn’t beat the door down (she had tried that). She watched him stagger to his knees and clutch his throat, and look up at her. He couldn’t speak. She had all she could do not to sing down to him, “Did you take your tablets before your meal?” When he fell, his body made a shadow and then a stain on the terrace.
She feared starvation, but scarcely a day later the dwarf and his crew came along with their awesome Clock. The Dragon had stretched its armored swanlike neck nearly as high as her windowsill, and she had been able to escape, exchanging one affectionate fiend for another. But at least the dwarf and his toothsome boys had sworn against sex with a woman, so they were a better company to keep for the time being.
Mr. Boss deduced that his reticent recruit was in a perplexed mood. He asked, “What were you doing in the service of that Grandpa Ogre, anyway?”
She looked hither and yon. Though the boys were far enough ahead not to hear, she didn’t want to talk about most of it. She said, “My invalid master professed that in exchange for chores I could perform, I could barter for my freedom. I had three years to go when he became cross with me and locked me in that tower. It was too high to escape from, unless one wanted to jump to one’s death. Once in my childhood I had thought I could fly—but I had no wings of my own. It took your dragon with its own wings to reach its neck up so I could crawl on top of it, and scramble to safety. Did the dragon tell you I would be there, or was it just my luck?”
“Please! I don’t dabble in contingency theory. Too rich for my numbish skull.”
“How long am I beholden to you for your kindness?”
“Ah, that I can’t say. The Clock spells out its designs of fate only as far as it wants me to know them.”
They were silent. More companionable than usual. The dwarf in his way was as indentured as she was in hers. She had seen him set up the Clock only once, to put
on an exhibition for a petty brigand who’d come across them on a stretch of paved road and threatened them with a pistol. She’d watched the sergeant-at-hand ratchet the gears until the whole tall instrument was quivering with tension. They all stood back as the Clock invented a little entertainment. She didn’t yet know if the Clock was merely distracting, a tiktok cleverness, or enchanted.
A puppet arrived under the arch of a little proscenium up top. He looked uncannily like the brigand, right down to the gusseted Lincoln-green tunic and the pistol. The puppet looked this way and that, as if to make sure he was alone. Then he sat down and clasped the pistol, barrel upright, between his legs and began to stroke the shaft of it.
No children’s puppet play, this. She’d closed her eyes.
“That’s filthy,” murmured the bandit, somewhat approvingly.
She heard the puppet rocking back and forth. Though there was no sound, she could tell by the quickening of the rhythm that the big pop was near. “Stop,” she’d tried to say, but her voice had fled: She knew no one was listening to her.
“Whoa,” said the bandit, “you’ve got some nerve—”
She had peered between lashes, she admitted it: The mouth of the pistol had fountained a surge of foamy blood all over the trousers of the puppet, who fell back, sated and, it seemed, dead.
Worried that the Clock was not just illustrative of morals but perhaps a hand of fate, she’d whirled to see the brigand. He was slack jawed at the performance (though that was the only part of him slack), and he hadn’t yet noticed that the boys had liberated him of his considerable wallet and his pistol both.
They kept the cash and the bullets and returned the pistol before releasing him. They had nothing to fear: He tore off crashing through the underbrush like a fox from hounds.
The blood was good, no? asked the dwarf. Juice of blood oranges and pomegranates thickened with cream of tartar. The Clock is talented but needs some fuel from time to time.
She hadn’t asked how it came to be that the Clock was supplied with a puppet resembling a chance highway robber. Such a turn put paid to the notion of chance at all. Still, in some ways that was consoling: She could stay where she was, clandestine and still, and freely believe that this must be her fate. The need to decide further was removed from her, which made something of a rest.
“I won’t keep you longer than I’m directed to,” said the dwarf now, as they headed toward the sanctuary he had divined might take them in.
“You did me a service by rescuing me. I’m not looking to leave you. I have no plans but to keep out of sight. I merely worry at the thought of armies massing around us.”
“Armies are only hunters in formation. Upright teams of precision hunters.”
“Once I hunted for information, but one of my informants was killed. I have retired from hunting, Mr. Boss. I am no fan of the spoils of the game.”
He reached out to pat her wrist but she tucked her hands in her shawl. Such reticence she showed! Hoping to further this unexpected moment of confidences, the dwarf asked her, “How would you feel about a Lion hunt?”
A Coward for His Country
• 1 •
A LION AT rest.
How old was he now? Thirty-eight? Forty? How long had he been waiting to see some shade of the world other than grim yellow?
That oracle, who was blind with age, could see more than he could. Damn her.
Was she holding out on him? Running for the chapel just when they were closing in on the questions he most needed to ask? Where is the Grimmerie? Where was Elphaba’s rumored son, Liir—where had he disappeared to? If anyone in Oz might know, it had to be Yackle. Yackle wasn’t the only person who had cared about Elphaba—there was Lady Glinda, among others—but Yackle was the one who had been able to see into the darkness of Elphaba’s life.
A vision like that—what he wouldn’t give to have some…some sense of scope. Some perspicacity. But he could never see forward. Even the act of looking back—at how he had gotten himself hip-deep in muck, again and again—even that was hard for him to fathom.
Well, he wasn’t giving up this time. He’d proved useless at his earliest tasks, like finding Jemmsy’s father. A total loser and no mistake. He’d always run off at the first sign of trouble. But now there was nowhere left to run. It was this or prison.
So he let her see of him what she would, with her oracle’s inner eye; she didn’t need to hear him voice his reservations about himself out loud. There were things he would never say to any female, whether she was a Lioness or a human, a judge or an oracle, a petty whore or a pettier maunt.
A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him—so why bother?—but a female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible. Yackle would prove no exception, he was sure.
How different his life might have been if he had emerged from the Great Gillikin Forest right at the outskirts of the town of Tenniken instead of at Traum. Sure, now he knew: A talking Lion would have had a rough go of it anywhere under the Wizard’s jurisdiction. Yet if Brrr had been able to deliver the medal of honor back to Jemmsy’s father, he’d have had an early experience of reaching a goal. Of not being diverted.
But remembering what had happened in Traum—even thinking about it today—had been a mistake. Living with amnesia, the way those cretinous Bears in the Great Gillikin Forest did, was the only sensible strategy.
The word lionized had more than one meaning.
His youth, his stupidity, had been no more than that. Stupidity was forgivable in the young. But when he’d lain down and played dead in Traum—it had been no more and no less than a collapse of his enfeebled sense of himself—he’d made himself into an emblem of complicity. “Remember the cowardly Lion,” the humans had said in Traum. “He laid down his life for us.”
Sunk in a fug of self-loathing, he’d bypassed Tenniken entirely. Paid the conductor extra to stay on to Shiz. (No other Animals rode the train that day, though, sealed into his own mortification, he hadn’t noticed. Later, he wondered if some good burgher of Traum had bribed the conductor to allow Brrr to board at all, just to get him out of the vicinity.)
Still, the sight of the outskirts of the ancient university town caught Brrr’s attention, drawing him out of his funk. He peered through the grimy train windows. First, the great manufacturing plants. Brick factories with glass transoms, spewing noxious plumes out of zigzaggy smokestacks. Closer to the city-centre, terraced housing for millworkers. Their laundry yards swarmed with small human cubs, at play with their skipping ropes and stones.
And then into the close, gnarled, ancient university center of Shiz. Its separate colleges in promiscuous adjacency. Each boasted an ivy-clawed gatehouse through which passersby could glimpse serene quadrangles…brilliant chapels, lecture halls…science labs chasing the latest developments in two dozen separate branches of enquiry.
The Lion had taken stock of the smart little city, the jewel of the province of Gillikin. He’d explored its nests of colleges and its clubs and its manicured parks and canals, and then he’d set himself up in a better class of residence. Not far from Ticknor Circus, with its array of bistros and bathhouses. A sunny, top-floor den in a purpose-built brick mansion block called Ampleton Quarters. Suite 1904. Fully furnished and featuring the most up-to-the-tiktok in water closets.
Was he aware that he might be trading on a reputation as the very Lion who had inadvertently advanced the Wizard’s plans in the emerald trade, helping to squelch the spontaneous labor revolt? Innocent as he was, it would have been hard for him to discern the ways in which he was receiving undue advantage. His first time in a city—or the first time that he could remember. No other Lions seemed to live in Ampleton Quarters; but then, he tended to hurry to his flat, and avoided the biweekly tenants’ meetings because he didn’t want to be bullied into serving on any committees.
He kept his mouth closed as much as possible. And compa
ratively speaking, a Lion cuts a fine figure; the world admires a glossy mane, a sultry-surly growl. One can make an impression without saying much, and Brrr learned that he was not bad-looking, as Lions go.
But being good-looking has its own penalties. The public will not let a comely face walk by anonymously; it must find out who owns it. By the end of his first social season in Shiz, Brrr had made the grade. He enjoyed the occasional off-night, back-alley shenanigans but he built a more formal life on the strength of his reputation as a hero.
He didn’t consider marriage. He didn’t have the stomach for it. Instead, he invested his little nest egg in a portfolio of diversified stocks managed by a Shiz bank called the Gold Standard. In the first few years it swelled agreeably. While the rest of Oz was still suffering the effects of the long drought, and farmsteads in Munchkinland were being repossessed for back taxes, the industrial base of Gillikin allowed waistlines to amplify and chins to double. Brrr grew prosperous, and lived like it. He kept to himself. Cultivating the reputation of a mystery presence about town, he avoided close contact of a genuinely intimate nature, and therefore—he hoped—he might be excused for failing to see the social coercion, the repression on which the Shiz haut monde was built.
He took in shows. He meandered through galleries. Without much attention to the topic at hand, he attended the occasional public lecture at Three Queens College or Briscoe Hall; it seemed to be something the well-heeled did in a university town like Shiz. He never took notes, although sometimes he tried mentally to assess his compounded interest for the quarter while the lecturer was nattering on.
Brrr especially enjoyed those presentations on the subject of art history, not least because the lights would go down when the gloriously colored illuminatums were to be cast upon a white plaster wall. In the darkened hall, no one could notice if Brrr was paying attention or not. Thus, freed of anxiety, he found he did appreciate the lectures. And he stayed awake, unlike some.