Rather than pray, Yackle trained her memory to recall the faded frescoes of angels that had adorned the higher reaches of the chapel walls and the vaulted ceiling. For all she knew, the images had been whitewashed over by now, angels having gone out of fashion somewhat—but beyond the hedge of her blindness Yackle could picture the paintings well. Gamine female angels in trailing robes, arching their ankles and pouting their mouths as if in perpetual erotic bliss. Wings like mattresses—imagine being an angel prettily taken against the soft resistance of her own feathery appendages. The male angels hardly less vulnerable.
How tedious to be an angel: So much holy vigor, and all directed to the Unnamed God who, without form or name or provable substance, could hardly be expected to enjoy the attentions that angels seemed eager to supply.
Probably those images had been whitewashed over. While the mission settlement of this outpost was conveniently distant from the spiritual governance of the EC, the self-appointed Holy Emperor of Oz had wielded his influence upon the varied religious and agnostic traditions of the nation. Probably the bosomy nymphs and rosy-bottomed angel boys above had been banished beyond the cloud of unknowing, a lime wash swirled with a brush. Oh, the happy memories that the soft-bristled brush must cherish!
She was working herself into a state of agitation.
She tried to concentrate for a moment on the music.
But sacred music—another anomaly. If in the Afterlife every good thing coexists eternally, then music cannot exist. Music is the stuttering of adjacent noises in sequence—stress, discord, complaint, resolve: then release—and sequence means timing. If the sound of music is simultaneous, all notes sounding at once, forever, then it is just sound. A mothy blur of noise. A sea of aural fuzz.
“Yield up, yield up,” sang the maunts, in a dirge written, surprisingly, in waltz time. Yackle remembered it and tapped her toes.
“Yield up your souls
To singe the air.
Yield up, and mount the heavenly stair.
Yield up, yield up,
You’re almost there.
You’ve dropped your bones in the sod.
Yield up, yield up, yield up your souls
To the darksome, nameless disappearance:
The heart of the Unnamed God.”
When Sister Doctor approached the podium to offer a eulogy for the dead soldiers, Yackle stood up and rambled away.
• 3 •
S HE WAS almost back to the chamber where Brrr was conducting his interviews when she was interrupted by an unfamiliar smell. In the corridor’s chill stony breath, a mild, milky reek of tubers. At about the level of her thighs.
“Who is it?” she said, thinking: A dog? A raccoon? A Munchkinlander she hadn’t met yet? (Sister Apothecaire was the only Munchkinlander in residence, and her musk was redolent of rotting tea leaves, no matter how much lavender she doused herself with.) Then Yackle thought: I’m a bit potty—I imagine this to be old what’s-’er-name, the Glikkun from the Lion’s past. Sakkali Oafish. A Glikkun would smell of root vegetables; they all live underground.
But it was a male voice that replied. “Sticky trickle, who’d have guessed this? You old thing? Still? What’s propping you up?”
She knew the voice, from years and years back. “Making trouble again?” she snapped at the dwarf.
“I never make trouble,” he protested, chuckling. “I make way for trouble.”
“What are you doing here? In a cloister of religious women, of all unseemly places?”
“Not my first choice,” he admitted. “But small and incidental as I am, no more than a straw in the floods of history, I am pushed ahead of the approaching Messiars. The Emerald City will be catching news of the attack this morning. Retaliation time. Of course it’s all in the cards, don’t you know? The armies are already here, prepared for the next provocation. What an obvious game, what a tedious one. But I agree: I don’t like being washed up on the banks of a religious establishment any more than you do, I suspect.”
“Well, get out of here, then,” she said. “I want nothing to do with your meddling.”
“But I don’t meddle,” he repeated. “I don’t even comment. I simply perch and watch. Keep my own counsel. Lips sealed, eyes open. How have you managed to stay alive, you old heathen?”
“One gasp at a time. And I have no time to grant you an audience just now. Get out of my way, you imp. You hobgoblin.”
“My feelings are hurt.” His voice wheedled, almost affectionately. “And we go so far back.”
“So far back, and no further forward,” she said. “Get out of my way.”
“You haven’t run into a Lion slouching along these corridors, have you?”
She rounded on him. “What is your game, you miscreant?”
“Oh, you know me, Missus Madame Maenad. You think you’re the only one with an eye to the future, but I take my marching orders from a pretty terrific instrument on wheels. I was led to believe I’d find a Lion about here. Times being what they are, I suppose I need another conscript, maybe one with claws.”
“You—you stay away from him. If you find him. He’s on a mission.”
“You defending some craven beast? Say it ain’t so. I thought you were never out for any but yourself.”
Yackle didn’t answer. She just saw in her indeterminate way a kind of shadow of the Lion, slump-spined, bejowled, bewhiskered. A hat rotating in his hands, a stain on his vest. Afflicted with the twitch of always looking over his own shoulder. “The Lion’s not in play here,” she said.
She left the dwarf. As far as Yackle knew, the dwarf was as nameless as the Unnamed God—but not as blameless. Assuming that the Unnamed God was blameless in the matter of human suffering—and if you assumed that, you could have no use for such an ineffectual deity.
She ground her teeth as she moved on by. And then she thought: Maybe that sore old stump of a dwarf is my salvation, after all. Maybe the Lion is just a decoy, a distraction. Maybe it was the dwarf’s impending arrival that called me from my unquiet tomb, and Brrr just happened to be in the way. Surely being in the wrong place at the wrong time seemed to be that unlucky scalawag’s single occupation in life.
• 4 •
W HEN SHE came into the chamber she was agitated, but Brrr hardly noticed. His own fur was ruffled at the news of the military debacle. “We will finish our work this morning,” he said to Yackle, before she’d even had the chance to settle into her chair. “The reprisal for last night’s disaster at Kellswater is aiming right this way. I can feel it. I intend to have cleared out before it strikes. Let’s get this interview wrapped up.”
“Nothing can be wrapped up,” she snapped.
“Save your irritation for the lunch menu,” he replied, as brusquely. He flipped open his notebook. The glass cat looked a little alarmed at the sharpness between them, and regarded the window ledge. But the sash was swung open this morning, letting in light and air, and perhaps the cat was just smart enough to know that it was too old to rely on being able to jump and perch without tipping out the window and plunging—to shatter into shards?—into the gravel far below.
“This is our second meeting,” said Brrr, writing it down on a new page, “and our last one. We spent too much time dancing each other’s histories yesterday. Down to business, and at once, before the army arrives.”
“And arrive it will,” she said. “I have it on the highest authority.”
“Your deepest sixth sense?” he asked, cuttingly.
“No,” she admitted. “Higher than that. My trust in human cruelty. But ask your question; I’m as sick of this as you are. I’d like to see your big furry behind waddling away. Or imagine it, anyway. And plant an old boot in it as you leave, for that matter.”
“You wouldn’t be the first. Now listen. About the rumors circulating for a decade or so that Elphaba Thropp had a son. That boy named Liir.”
“What about him?”
“If he is her son, and if he is still alive, and if he has
no sisters from Elphaba, then he is next in line to inherit the position of Eminent Thropp. He would be the de facto governor of Munchkinland. His claim would trump that of the Holy Emperor of Oz, Shell Thropp. Elphaba’s brother.”
“I know who Shell is, and I know about Liir, too.”
“Can you confirm he is Elphaba’s son? Or if he is alive? He was here, it seems—some years ago.”
She had no interest in giving the Lion any scrap of information that might help the EC thugs locate Liir. She spoke cautiously and shared only what she thought was redundant or immaterial. “Yes. He has been here three times in his life. Once as a young child—perhaps even an infant—when Elphaba wasn’t yet the Wicked Witch of the West. She set out from here to the castle in the west—”
“Kiamo Ko.”
“Yes, yes, whatever it’s called. She repaired there for reasons of her own. She took the child with her, though where he came from originally—if he was really her issue—I don’t know.”
“Don’t you know through your inner vision? Can’t you figure it out?”
“Even if I did know, what proof would you have? Only my word. I might as well say he was the result of a broomstick handle poking itself hot and jolly in the vortex of a tall black hat. What difference would it make? Just because I have had visions doesn’t mean they’re true.”
Though she had never said that to herself before.
He grunted. “Didn’t sleep well, did we.”
She glared at him as well as a blind person can manage. He continued in a more neutral tone. “Whatever you say goes on record. Let someone else decide if it is true or not. When was the other time you saw Liir?”
“It was after he’d been attacked in the air by the Emperor’s dragons, as I understand it. He was left for dead in the Disappointments a little to the south. Some do-gooder hauled his carcass here for the maunts to tend. Then a young Quadling woman named Candle, a novice, brought him back to health and life, through devices and schemes of her own.”
“You had nothing to do with it?”
She paused.
“Don’t lie to me, don’t lie to me,” he roared. “Why bother? The whole world lies! Don’t you do it, too!”
“I helped her a little,” said Yackle. How odd to feel capable of being shaken. Maybe she was dying! Her spirits lifted at once. “Yes, I helped her, why not? I didn’t know if Liir was Elphaba’s son, but he might have been; I could see that. I remembered him from childhood. So I introduced a little romance into the therapeutic situation. Oh, Candle, that weird duck: She was a honey, but a mystery, too.”
“As who isn’t,” he said.
“As who isn’t,” she agreed. “So I took it upon myself to stand guard upon the tower room where she was helping him cling to life, in all the ways that a young woman can and will.”
“Ways?” The Lion was all ears. His whiskers trembled.
“Don’t be prurient, you old goat.”
“You said it. You mean it, too; I can tell.”
She had said it; it had slipped out. Time for damage control. “Yes,” she continued. “I had never enjoyed the benefit of a good leg-over. I thought she might. I thought he might. He looked rather scathingly virginal to me. Call it, what term do they use—call it transference. Call it divine sublimation. Call it a metaphor. I locked them in together and let their natures run their course.”
“And what happened?”
“I am a cupid of sorts,” she said, “but I’m not a peeping lecher. History will decide what happened, not you or I.”
“But what did happen? I mean, whether they screwed around or not—what happened next?”
“What happened is they left the mauntery under cover of dark. As you would have been wise to do yourself last night.”
“Where did they go?”
She paused a while and then said, “This is all old business. I suppose it can’t hurt anyone to say.”
“Who are you protecting,” he rushed in, “and why?”
Ah, but that was it, wasn’t it? She admired him for catching her drift. She answered his earlier question, though. “The maunts had once kept a little printing press off the grounds. A sideline to the religious life: producing pamphlets that opposed the warmongering of the Emperor. Rather by accident, the press had been discovered by the Emperor’s men, who more or less destroyed it. But they never traced the sedition to here. The press was housed some little distance, a day’s journey or so from here. I loaded the couple up on a donkey—poor Liir was just barely alive—and I sent them on their way without confiding in my sisters. I thought that was the end of them.”
“You did.” He said it flatly, intending to be as neutral as plaster. Keep going, old lady.
“Yes, but then some short time later—weeks, I think, a few months at the most—Liir returned to the mauntery a final time. He and a soldier of the EC, a minor Menacier named Trism bon Cavalish, had torched the stables of the flying dragons and fled from the Emerald City. It was a case of political action—espionage—I don’t know what you’d call it. But a force of the Emerald City under a Commander Cherrystone gave hot pursuit, and arrived at these walls just shortly after the lads did. This was before I went blind—oh, nine years ago, perhaps? And Liir therefore was perhaps twenty, his companion several years older.”
“Was Liir caught?”
“You know he wasn’t.” Of this she was sure. “Don’t waste your time, Sir Brrr; there isn’t that much of it left. If he had been caught, it would be in the records. And you wouldn’t be here asking about him.”
“You’re right,” he admitted. “But what happened to them?”
“Liir took the Witch’s broom and he left the mauntery from the rooftops. It happened that Lady Glinda was in residence—she was a kind of patroness of the order, don’t you know; years ago she changed her own name from Galinda to the more stylish Glinda. To honor the popular saint, to bury her rural origins, some other reason. Who knows. Anyway, she made an effort to get Trism out as one of her retinue, and it seemed to work at first. The team that was hunting the lads didn’t dare accuse Lady Glinda of treason—not without some kind of proof. She had after all been on the Throne of Oz for a time. She still enjoyed a cherished position in the hearts of her people, though the political climate had changed so much, and for the worse.”
“Naturally. Some of us get accused of treason for no reason. Others who deserve it waft free as a bubble on the breeze. Go figure.”
“Shhh. Listen. When Glinda thought they were safely free of scrutiny, she dismissed bon Cavalish to his own campaigns. She didn’t know that she was being trailed, and that the EC thugs would continue after Trism. They set upon him and beat him up. Brutalized him pretty badly, I heard, before letting him escape. They were sure that he would lead them to the place where he and Liir would meet. There was a romance between them, see.”
“I thought you had arranged for Liir a romance with Candle.”
“Oh, la, romance will find its own outlets, don’t you think?”
He wasn’t about to comment. “So they tracked Trism to the farm.”
“See,” she said, “you know about this already.”
He purred a dangerous sound. The glass cat looked around, alarmed, as if it had discovered a thorn in its own throat.
“I never called it a farm,” she pointed out.
“I have done my research,” he admitted. “Aren’t I allowed that?”
“We choose our own bosses,” she agreed. “Except those who work as slaves. Now in fact, Trism somehow gave those soldiers the slip for a couple of days. Not for long—they had bloodhounds on the job, can you believe it—but for a precious couple of days. Trism introduced himself to Candle, it seems, and what happened between those two—well, that I can’t say.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
“As good as the same thing, my dear.”
“But we’re at the nub of it now. Was Trism jealous of Candle? Or vice versa? They shared a lover, after all. Did they go
at each other like wildcats?”
“Is this germane to your investigation, or do I detect a particular interest in sexual jealousy? An uptick in your circulation? Some shallow breathing?”
“Fuck you.”
“If I’d only been so lucky.”
Shadowpuppet seemed to catch the tension. It paused in its morning ablutions and studied a spot on the wall as if embarrassed at the decline of civility.
Brrr governed himself. Don’t lose it now. You’re closing in on things.
“Candle and Trism. Did their mutual attraction to Liir translate somehow into an attraction to each other? With Liir off rambling on some obligation or other—out of the farm—away from prying eyes—what happened?”
Or were Candle and Trism just using each other, somehow? As he and old Yackle were doing just now?
“There are some things even oracles can’t determine,” admitted Yackle. “What I do know is that by the time Liir returned, Trism had already left. Maybe he wanted to avoid Liir. Maybe he had persuaded Candle to join him later in some safe harbor, far from the attentions of a novice magician.”
“Magician!”
“Well, if Liir were Elphaba’s son, he’d be a witch of sorts, wouldn’t he? Or have the potential, anyway? That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Now don’t you lie to me,” she snapped. “Have I ferreted out from you what your real aim is? Are you looking for Liir? You want to get at him through any avenue possible—through either of his lovers, Candle or Trism, or…”
Still, she paused; she couldn’t say it.
“Or what?” Brrr hoped that she would tell him what he wanted to know—the Grimmerie, the Grimmerie!—instead of what she needed to share. She kept on.