“We’ll blow them to kingdom come!” cried one of the boys, excitable but dull. His pals didn’t bother to remind him they traveled without firearms. Their only defense was the dread that the oracle could inspire in the gullible. Though they had no idea how gullible the soldiers of an invading battalion could be, or if they would stop long enough to discover gullibility in themselves.
“Heave now, heave,” called the dwarf, but even he tried to keep his voice down.
The birds of the oakhair forest, who had settled for the night, revived their twitter. Ilianora thought again of the birds in the hall, on the night she had first scribbled a fanciful tale as a stay against discovery. Sing your hearts out, she thought: Let us know from which direction the danger is strongest.
But alone of the company, she walked without much fear. She cared for her companions, in a modest way, and hoped they would survive. Certainly she didn’t want them to suffer. But she had a prerogative of calm, in that she alone had no obligation to the oracle or to the future they all muscled in favor of or against. Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.
They couldn’t continue without light now; the night had truly arrived. The dwarf lit torches and gave her one to carry. “Go front, if you’ve the heart for it,” he mumbled to her. She knew the lads would be emboldened by her prominence, and that they couldn’t risk affixing lanterns to the cart lest a stray bullet smash a glass chimney and the whole kindle box explode in flames.
Though what a sight that would be! Another kind of release, she supposed.
She did as she was bidden. She had a decent instinct for finding a way. The floor of the forest was fairly level, here between the lakes, and for that they all were grateful—though who could know for sure they weren’t driving themselves directly into the line of fire of the Munchkinland resistance coming from the east?
Riding up top, the sergeant-at-hand had no need of a whip. Four of his beauty boys, as he called them, in a kind of jerry-rigged harness, dragged the clockwork oracle along. The other three put their shoulders to the back of it, helping it through ruts and over the roots of oakhair trees. The wind had died down, which was unfortunate: As the company made its way through the strung verticals of the oakhair nuts, they set weird shimmering chords to vibrate around them. It sounded like piano strings long out of tune being scampered upon by mice.
Surely if the EC forces were to come upon their left flank, the soldiers would be playing their own entrance theme?
If the acolytes of the Clock stopped, and let all the oakhair strands fall silent, they might hear where else in the forest a cacophony was being struck. But the boys were now zealous and slightly mad with fear, and wouldn’t respond to the sergeant-at-hand’s proposal that they pause for a moment to listen.
The wagon met a gentle but longer slope than usual, and the boys grunted at their work. Though he weighed little, the sergeant-at-hand leaped from his perch to lighten the load. He came forward to walk beside Ilianora. He stood only half as tall as she did, when he was standing upright. She thought, not for the first time, This little man, these seven boys: It sounds like a story I might have made up, back when I was writing down such fancies.
“I’ve been through this way before,” he said. “We’ll level off for a bit, and unless the undergrowth is fuller than usual, we ought to be able to see Kellswater down to our left.”
“You’ve been everywhere in Oz,” she replied.
“Sure seems like it, after all this time.” He knew enough not to ask her about her own travels. She wouldn’t answer. Waste of breath.
“How far to the northeast was the Munchkinlander encampme—”
“Shhh—”
They were reaching the flattening crest of the long slope, and the first missile flew by—not a rifle shot, as they’d expected, but an arrow. It buried its head in a tree trunk, and a second followed, and a third.
“We’re in it,” he hissed. “Boys, drop!” Ilianora clamped the cap on the lamp to extinguish it, to buy them a minute or two. But four more arrows, and the shouts of a force thrashing up the left flank of the rise: It would be only a moment before they were captured.
The moon cruelly opened her eye from behind the mounded cutouts of cloud, and they could see the silhouettes of soldiers against the steel-white water of the lake below.
“We’ll plead neutrality, see where it gets us,” said the dwarf, dragging at Ilianora’s hand to pull her to her knees. “Boys, you imbeciles, get down!”
Being lower down, the soldiers were at a disadvantage, but they were trained. Ilianora could see the crossbow aiming, could see the glint of bayonet. They swarmed—thirty, forty, fifty—a half mile out. The sound of crushing underbrush, the strum of advancing men. “Hie, on the narrow,” cried one; the voice was businesslike as it carried, like a professional herder of cattle. “Hist, second volley,” called another. “Grade and scale,” said someone nearish; “Bloody unlikely,” came the reply. A shot rang out.
“We fly no emblem!” cried the sergeant-at-hand, but another shot muddied the sound of his words. “Fucking hell, we offer no resistance!” he yelled, irritated enough that his voice rattled into a falsetto shriek.
The Clock had other ideas about this. The great dragon head lifted from its mechanical sleep and rotated like a swan, and eyes with a dull carmine spark shifted in the dark. The leather nostrils dilated and the tin scales scraped upon one another as the armature of the wings stretched like two sails in the woods. It was, perhaps, just enough to cause the closest EC Messiars to halt, as they tried to work out what huge creature waited, glowering and creaking in the dark. The light shifted.
“Keep going!” cried the sergeant-at-hand to his pony-boys. “Mischief is having her own say!”
The nostrils flared. Coils of steam-grey smoke fell out in slow hanks, unrolling as they dropped, thickening like gelatin beads in water. Within a moment, the Clock was shrouded in a fog that smelled of yeast and mud.
“Grade and lower!” cried a commander. “Pox on my eyes,” cried an advance scout, quite close; they could hear him breathing and swearing, and he fell to the ground.
“I mean to keep on,” said the sergeant-at-hand. “Walk the way forward, Miss Trip-Through-the-Trees, and pluck our way out of here, strand by strand if you must.”
The hilltop was smeared with fog, no less troublesome to Ilianora than to the Emerald City division, but she’d had the advantage of reaching the summit before their attackers, and she had seen a bit of how the land went. Along a ridge, and then down a scalloped recess; she could get them that far. She reached out and plucked a wry song out of the struts of the forest. A pizzicato progress. The company kept close behind her, and the dragon trawled a breathy cloak that did not quickly thin.
They were well away, perhaps as much as a mile, before the oakhair trees gave out, and a grove of taller stag-head oaks crowned the next gentle hump. There the company paused to rest and judge by the moon whether they had strayed too far east. The dwarf’s destination was due north. Clearest route out of the danger was due north. The dragon’s eyes had gone dim and the bellows of its nostrils now trailed only faint, acrid wisps. Its wings settled back in their customary place, folded across their mount with reticulated wrist-claws pointing straight up like spear heads.
“It’s a bad night to be wandering in the woods,” said the sergeant-at-hand. “Unlucky for some, though not for us. Hide your eyes lest the glint give us away.”
The company froze, looking through fingers where he pointed. Eighty feet to the northeast, a group of Munchkinlanders in tabards and boots were preparing some sort of a catapult. They were whispering—they must have heard something of the commotion downslope. But they seemed oblivious of the company of the Clock hunched on its separate hilltop. They were too involved in their own efforts at stirring something in a large spherical iron pot at least as tall as they were.
It
was nothing short of a miracle that their attention was so riveted by their preparations. Yet through the dragon’s breath, which continued to lay close to the ground, the muffled complaints of the EC men clearly identified their location: a mile or so along the ridge and below it, to the west. The twang of snapped oakhair strands; the cursing of the soldiers and the hollering insults of their officers.
The smoke didn’t clear for another quarter hour, by which time the Munchkinlander guerrillas had slid their heavy artillery overland on something like a forest sledge, sleek birch runners that used the slick of pine needles to advantage. When the smoke thinned enough that the moonlight again struck the surface of Kellswater, the company of the Clock could see well enough. Not the attack of the Munchkinlanders, not the lobbing of the fiery pitch they’d prepared in their dreadful cup. Not the EC soldiers cowering or falling back—all that remained concealed by the great dark and undifferentiated folds of the hills, the screen of oakhair limbs. What the company could see was the metallic rings of bright moonlit water that grew out from the shore, circles interrupting slow circles, chevrons divided into shards, as one after another the EC Messiars were driven backward into the lake.
The Past Approaches
• 1 •
T HE DAWN was a masked one, clouds making modest the exhibitionist sun.
Brrr, whose sleep had been erratic, sat up. In the corner, as yet un-struck by light, Shadowpuppet looked like watery milk. A small heap of shit, its tapering point like the head of a worm, lay coiled nearby. Brrr couldn’t imagine how a transparent creature could produce opaque offal, but if this was a philosophical question in disguise, he wasn’t up to considering it before breakfast.
He stood and tried to press the wrinkles out of his coat. Not that the humble maunts nor the blind oracle would care.
He couldn’t see out the window; what an appetite a window awoke. He wanted to look down on the terrain, to observe the nearer wheat fields and the oakhair forests farther off. To plot, if he could, the movement of opposing militias. To note if the chimney of that small farmhouse in the wheat was issuing the smoke of kitchen fires, or had the crusty residents finally abandoned their homestead during the night?
Lacking the window, though, his eye veered inward for a last, involuntary lurch toward his most private possession, the memory of Muhlama.
She’d gone, bounding with energy away from him, up an escarpment of rocks the color of pearlfruit rinds. Now that his whiskers were starting to whiten, he could imagine all too well some male Ocelot lurking beyond the rocks. Or maybe even a Fell Tiger—someone who fit Muhlama better, both in character and in the congress of sexual organs, than the stout and Cowardly Lion.
One thing was certain; she hadn’t been unpracticed at the art of receiving sexual advances. She worked herself to her satisfaction with a talent that Brrr had first mistaken for his own glorious technique. Later—again with the laters—he’d mused on her expertise. Lover in the underbrush somewhere?
Felinity. You never knew, as he was the first to admit.
“Come on, Shadowpuppet,” said Brrr, nudging the old cat with a sheathed paw. “Time to finish our interviews. Unriddle the riddles at hand, not the ones out of reach.”
The cat purred, and Brrr purred back. The best part of these late days was in their purring wordlessly together. The closest to companionship he got.
Then, hitting the society of crabby, tired, black-clad maunts on their way toward morning devotions, the best part of the day was behind them.
Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire were hotly arguing on a landing. They turned at his approach.
“Ladies,” he said, “I thought charity ruled in a house like this one.”
“Mind your own business,” said Sister Doctor.
“That’s your answer to everything,” snapped Sister Apothecaire. She held her hand to her side, as if she had a case of stitches; perhaps she’d been running. In any case, she was a stout little thing, and the staircase had not been built with Munchkinlander legs in mind.
“Anything I can help with?” His tone sounded grand this morning; maybe just remembering Muhlama once in a while had a tonic effect.
“You can finish your work and be on your way,” said Sister Apothecaire.
“You can join us in chapel to pray for those who died last night,” said Sister Doctor.
His ruff went up. “Not Yackle?”
“No, but if she keeps refusing to die, we can put her coffin on wheels and slide her into Kellswater like—like—” Here Sister Doctor, who was one hard cookie, lost a startled little tear from the outside of each of her eyes. The drops rolled slowly down, like glue, as if astonished at their liberation.
“Don’t be wet,” snapped Sister Apothecaire, and then gave a nervous snuffle. Inadvertently she’d made a joke of some sort. Sister Doctor glared with hatred at her.
Brrr had no use for either of them. “But what? A new military maneuver? A rash broken out among the novices? What are you talking about?”
“We have had news of last night’s engagement,” said Sister Doctor. “An itinerant dwarf came to our door early this morning for food, and told us what he knew. In the middle of the night, the Munchkinlander militia surrounded a contingent of Emerald City Messiars and drove them down the slope of a bluff. The dwarf saw it all, he said. The Munchkinlanders herded the hapless soldiers right off the strand of sour pebbles and into the dead reaches of Kellswater.”
“It is impossible,” said the Lion.
“They kept shooting, a volley of arrows and scattershot alike—I don’t know the terms of the military trade—and the soldiers were driven deeper, waist-deep deeper; and eventually dove down to escape the onslaught.”
“But Kellswater is poison water,” said Brrr. “That’s what is said. Nothing grows there; no animal drinks at its shores.”
“That’s what is said, and that’s what is meant,” said Sister Doctor. “And there is a good reason. The soldiers came up dead—their bodies began to rot once they were immersed. They bobbed like so many carcasses. Not a single soul taken hostage, no mercy shown to any man jack among them.”
“Well,” said the Lion. “A military operation that worked, then.”
“The Munchkinlanders were unnecessarily cruel,” said Sister Doctor. “With their penchant for thoroughness, they did in an entire regiment that might have surrendered.”
“You take a lofty point of view.” Sister Apothecaire, being a Munchkinlander herself, was denied loftiness of any sort. “The Emerald City forces have invaded Munchkinland to annex the other lake—the big lake, the good lake. An illegitimate exercise from every angle. Why shouldn’t the Munchkinlanders defend their territory any way they see fit?”
“Good water and bad,” said the Lion, wanting to avoid taking sides here. “One lake is dead—a depthless basin of venom as far as anyone knows—and the other lake, only miles away, is the fount of life for the greatest green basket of arable land that Oz has. How can water display such variety in character?”
“You can be of help, Sir Brrr,” said Sister Apothecaire. “If you will. The dwarf tells us that the Munchkinlanders suffered heavy casualties on the ground before they conceived of this maneuver. We have had all our cart horses and donkeys requisitioned by one militia or another over the past several weeks. We have no way of pulling a cart for the collection of suffering bodies. Would you oblige us?”
He looked at Sister Doctor, imagining she would disapprove of offering succor to wounded Munchkinlanders, since she disapproved of their tactics. But she disappointed him; her cold dispersal of mercy, such a mercy as it was, was unequivocal.
“I think we have a cart in whose harness you would fit,” she said. “An embarrassment, I know—an indignity—but this is war, Sir Brrr.”
“I couldn’t possibly,” he said. “For one thing, there is the matter of an old injury to my spine. I try not to complain of it, but it makes some sorts of labor quite out of the question.”
“I have many
liniments useful at reviving sore muscles,” said Sister Apothecaire. “I keep a full stock of balms and lotions.”
“Then there is the deeper matter of my obligation to the Crown,” continued Brrr over her remarks. “I need to finish up my enquiries and be on my way to file my report.”
“You will be lucky to get out,” said Sister Doctor. “If what the dwarf tells us is true, then the Emerald City Messiars will launch an even more virulent campaign against the Munchkinlanders, and this quiet hermitage sits right in the path from one camp to another.”
“I will do what I must,” said the Lion.
“I will pray for the souls of my countrymen,” said Sister Apothecaire.
“I will hold grudges,” said Sister Doctor to them both, and she swept down the stairs. The glass cat, which had been silent throughout, hissed.
• 2 •
B RRR RETURNED to the interrogation parlor, but Yackle wasn’t there. She was in chapel, listening to liturgical music about flights of angels escorting the lucky dead to their rewards, a good rest among them.
The well of dark in which Yackle lived was something unlike what her companions assumed. Her blindness sometimes seemed to have little to do with vision. It seemed instead a kind of lack of desire, or of the desire that she imagined others felt. She experienced anticipation without the expectation of release—rather like what she assumed the libido of a eunuch might feel like. Or the spiritual ambitions of, say, a bedbug.
So in the chapel, as the maunts prayed for the drowned EC Messiars, Yackle didn’t listen to the devotional longing of the spinsters around her. She who didn’t seem able to die believed in death, as an article of faith—the only article of faith, and out of her reach!—though the notion of an Afterlife filled her with revulsion. Imagine the boredom of an Afterlife! All that undifferentiated yowling of praise. Yet the maunts, who had feared rape and murder or at any rate inconvenience by an occupying army, seemed ready to warble their hopes that forgiveness and everlastingness be granted to their predators. They were good women. They were nuts.