Then she raised her right hand and pointed over their shoulders. South. She made a shooing motion with her hand, a farmwife annoyed by chickens. Go! Go. Together. South.
Flee.
Hurry!
“She could get a job at Ticknor Circus doing charades,” admitted the dwarf. “She’s pretty good, though who’s to say she’s not some dybbuk tempting us to our doom?”
The snowflakes began to close in, obscuring the figure. The Grimmerie became stiff, the pages blocked. Nothing to do but close the damn book before the ground around it began to ice up and the Grimmerie froze to the earth.
“I’m going south,” said Brrr. “With Ilianora and with Rain. I’ll haul the Clock if you choose to come along, Mr. Boss. If you can’t bring yourself to join us, well, it’s been jolly when it hasn’t been a total nightmare.”
The dwarf pulled at his hands, all but whimpering, “The Clock said no girl.”
“Haven’t you ever known a Clock to tell the wrong time?” Though Brrr stopped there.
“All right. I’m beat.” The dwarf walked up to Rain; their faces were almost the same height. He waggled a finger. “But hey? Little funny kid? You’re not to touch this book again. I don’t like that look of entitlement on your smug face.”
“It’s called reading,” she retorted.
Whatever else they griped about—whoever the image had meant to remind them of, and they argued over it—they’d come to agreement about this much, at least: better to be caught on the road headed for other mischief than to be found squatting in a cul-de-sac like mice in a tin bucket. Since the battle for Restwater might be joined again at Haugaard’s Keep, to the east, then they’d head around the western tip of the lake, until they could follow the book’s advice and turn south.
Now the Lion discovered that the boys had been letting him do all the work since the day he arrived a half a year ago, back when the autumn came upon them to the sound of gunpowder explosions and the odd bugle bravocatory. The harness strained against his shoulders no less than it had last week.
The dwarf walked on one side of the wagon, Rain on the other.
Some lives are like steps and stairs, every period an achievement built on a previous success.
Other lives hum with the arc of the swift spear. Only ever one thing, that dedicated life, from start to finish, but how magnificently concentrated its journey. The trajectory seems so true as to be proof of predestination.
Still other lives are more like the progress of a child scrabbling over boulders at a lakeside—now up, now down, always the destination blocked from view. Now a wrenched ankle, now a spilled sandwich, now a fishhook in the face.
And that would be my method of locomotion, the Lion concluded. Not diplomas earned, but friendships bungled. Campaigns aborted. Errors in judgment and public humiliations. Not for nothing does the assignment of hauling the Clock of the Time Dragon between the shafts of a wooden cart seem a sort of vacation. A Lion in Oz glows in the gloom: hustlers and harlots, here’s your mark! But adjacent to the Time Dragon, however slackened it might be, a Lion could enjoy being overshadowed.
5.
Deciding on a destination always makes the weather improve, or seem to improve. Though the sun remained brutal and the winds weak, and the humidity felt heaped on like a sodden coat, the uncompanionable companions stepped sprightly. The farther they got from Mockbeggar Hall, the better off they’d be. The pines gave way to long gravelly stretches, like dried-up streambeds, perhaps evidence of a flow that had once moved from Kellswater into Restwater. The companions camped by day if they could find shade; by night they trod, wordless and lost but not, Brrr thought, in despair. Or not yet, anyway. As soon as the moon sank they stopped and rested too. No matter how hot it was, Rain slept against Brrr as if she were his kit.
Some days later, on the horizon, the first of the great oakhair trees began to lift their frondish heads. Brrr remembered this terrain from last fall. At noontime, they came within sight of the mauntery where Brrr had interviewed Yackle, and she him.
It sat and sulked by itself on its flat, like an armoire set out on a lawn. It looked deserted, but Brrr didn’t propose going nearer to satisfy his curiosity. Neither did anyone else. They kept to one side of the establishment, pushing south, deeper into the oakhair forest.
Ilianora carried the scythe the boys had sometimes wielded and she knocked down what bracken she could. If shadier, the woods were stiller, too. More spiders. Brrr hated spiders, but Rain scurried sideways to peer through each fretted oculus.
“What are you looking for?” he heard Ilianora ask her once.
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “The spider world. The world the spider sees. The other world.”
“Little goose.” Ilianora takes such a fond tone when trashing the dreams of the young, Brrr observed. “Little monkey. Little moron. There is no other world. This world is enough.”
“Of course no one asks me my opinion about other worlds,” growled Mr. Boss. “I who actually have traveled a good deal wider than some.”
“Well?” Rain rarely addressed the dwarf. “What would you say?”
He glowered at the girl, as if she were responsible for the Clock having suffered its rigor mortis. “Ah, what I could say, were I free to spill the beans.”
“Don’t fill her head with nonsense,” snapped Ilianora. “It’s unkind.”
“What about that Dorothy?” asked Rain. “En’t she from the other world?”
“Who told you anything about her?” asked the dwarf.
“Murthy did. When Lady Glinda was busy twisting her hair with that hot fork.”
“I knew it,” said Brrr, shaking his natural curls.
“Wherever she was from, Dorothy was a stooge of the Wizard,” said Ilianora. “She did his bidding, from what I heard. She killed Auntie Witch—”
She paused. Brrr rarely heard her mention Elphaba Thropp. He knew his wife well enough to guess that the phrase Auntie Witch, rising to her own lips, had startled her. He swished his tail in his wife’s face to amuse her. She blinked at him in a noncommittal way.
“Dorothy could have come from anywhere,” he drawled. “There’s a lot of Oz untraveled by the likes of Ozians. More outback than city centre in Oz, no? And beyond the sands, Fliaan and Ix, and other murky badlands too impossible to imagine.”
“That’s not what Murth says,” protested Rain. “She says Dorothy was from the Other Land. You can’t get there by a cart. Just by magic.”
“It’s a one-way ticket, honey,” said Mr. Boss. “Trust me on this one.” He turned his pocket out as if looking for a chit for the return voyage: nothing.
“Dorothy went back, though.”
“Hah. They probably topped her and tumbled her in some hole. And made up another story. Just like they did to Ozma. People will believe anything if it’s impossible enough.”
“Don’t,” said Brrr. “Let Rain learn the world the same way we all did.”
“The scientific method of child rearing? Analysis by trial and terror?” The dwarf cracked his knuckles. “Move aside, Lion. I’m going for a walk. I can’t sit here and listen to you corrupt a child with the limits of logic. You’re all boobs and bobbycats.”
He humped himself straight through the big spiderweb that Rain had been examining. Then he turned around and said, “Look, little wastrel girl. I’m on the other side. And what’s the news? It stinks over here, too.”
The Lion whispered to his spouse, “Is he going to hold against Rain until she’s old enough to jab him one between the eyes?”
“Who likes being cut out of the future?” she replied. “The Clock is giving no opinions—so how does he learn his way?”
“The same as the rest of us. Dread, shame, and luck.”
When he came back, forty minutes later, Mr. Boss had a wife in tow. His own wife. An unregenerate Munchkinlander whom Brrr believed he’d met before. The woman, like many of her kind, was compact, half as wide as she was tall, slightly bowed of leg, a f
ace like a dented saucepan. Some sort of weed in her hands—she’d been collecting herbs, maybe. She stumped forward into the clearing with the confidence of a woodcutter.
It took him a moment to place her. “Sister Apothecaire. As I live and breathe. I thought you’d taken a vow of chastity?”
“I accidentally left it behind in the mauntery when you carried me off in that cart six months ago. Oh well. Whoever finds it can keep it; I’m through with it. Anyway, mind your own beeswax.”
Ilianora turned to look. “It’s good to see you so recovered.”
“From my fall down the stairs? Or from my life as a maunt? Never mind. Now I appreciate that you were kind to carry me and my cracked noggin away from the mauntery before the EC forces arrived. Being a Munchkinlander, I might’ve been taken hostage. As I remember, I was rather cranky at the time, though. With some relief you passed me over to a team of women wheelers on their way to the EC for a championship tournament. I stayed with them for a few weeks, as they rehearsed their moves in a farmer’s meadow northwest of here,” explained Sister Apothecaire. “After a while, I realized even sports competitions are essentially political in nature. Who needs it. Besides, as a Munchkinlander I was too short to keep up with the team. So I found an abandoned woodman’s lean-to and made do.”
“Did you give no thought to returning to your roots in Munchkinland?” asked Ilianora. “Or repairing to the motherchapel in the Emerald City?”
“The motherhouse? Don’t make me laugh. They’ve been co-opted by the Emperor’s religious diktats for years. I’m not bowing to fix the sandal of the Emperor Apostle, no sirree. I may be short but I’m not that short. As to Munchkinland, I don’t have many relatives left in Center Munch. They were all ruined by the effects of that twister that passed through when I was a child. The one that carried that little fiend of the winds, Dorothy. So I’m an orphan spinster apostate, and this morning I woke up all alone, until I met Mr. Boss, who has improved my prospects.”
“I have no intention of improving anyone’s prospects,” said the dwarf, “my own included. That’s why I married you. Someone to share a similarly sour outlook, or even degrade it some. This lot is entirely too rosy now. They’re going to break into song any moment. They’ve even taken on a child to raise.”
“Ha,” said Ilianora. “No one raises that girl. We’re escorting her to safety. That’s all.”
At this Rain looked neither right nor left. She just kept studying the bole of a tree in which a squirrel might live, or an owl, or a chipmunk. Something secret, animal, magical. Unrelated.
“The curse of parenthood. As if the world can be safe.” The dwarf almost smiled at his traveling companions. “Anyway, you all can come back to our little hovel-in-the-hellebore and we’ll serve you an omelet. Her specialty is plover’s eggs and scallions.”
“It was all I was ever able to find,” confessed Sister Apothecaire. “I’m neither a hunter nor a gatherer, it seems. I’m more of a pantry parasite. Though I can bake a captivating muffin, given the right ingredients.”
They accepted the invitation. “Congratulations,” said Brrr to the dwarf as they walked along. “If I had a cigar, I’d give it to you to smoke in honor of your impending nuptial experience.”
“Oh, we’ve already consummated our union,” he replied.
Brrr raised an eyebrow.
“I’m a dwarf on a lonely road and I’ve been giving my life to this fool contraption as if there was something in it for me. She’s a Munchkinlander maunt who has been celibate since before her first milk tooth came in. Put it this way: we were ready.”
Well, thought the Lion. Bested at that game, too. By a dwarf, no less.
They approached the cottage in the woods, a ragged-roofed thing covered in old oakhair leaves. “Are you going to stay here?” asked Brrr. “Taking up the life of a retired husband? Collecting scallions instead of being bishop of the book, dragoman of the dragon?”
“Of course not. After a hundred years of service, or whatever it’s been—it’s felt that long anyway—I want to see this escapade to its natural end. Wifey can wait for me or come along, makes no difference to me. Ours is not a very strong marriage. Still, I love her, in my way.”
Mr. Boss grinned at his four-square bride. “What’s your name before you became Sister Apothecaire?”
She squinted, and put a finger to her lips. “I forget. In faith classes, they called me Little Daffodil.”
“Little Daffy. I like it. Well, come on, Little Daffy; let’s break out the best linen and tap a keg of springwater for our guests. It’s a wedding party, after all.”
Rain was skeptical about the newcomer. Her hard little face was like an old rye loaf left out in the sun. But in general the girl didn’t care for people, so her specific apprehensions of Little Daffy came and went, uncataloged, evanescent.
Brrr murmured to Ilianora, “Maybe this is our opportunity to peel off. Who would have guessed it? After all this time, our confirmed bachelor takes a wife.”
“Perhaps, the Clock being somnolent, he needed something else to nag him, and a wife serves that function handily,” said Ilianora, coming as close as she ever did to joking. Still, there was something to it.
After a slap-up supper Mr. Boss readied himself to get back on the road. Little Daffy went inside to tie on a fresh apron. Brrr admitted to being dubious about taking on another liability.
“You saddled us with a child, and you’re second-guessing me about picking up a wife?” The dwarf raised his fists at the Lion. “I’ve had it with you. Come on. Last one standing. It’s time to settle this.”
“I merely mean that your ladyfriend should be told about the danger we’re in,” said Brrr. He wasn’t going to fight a dwarf. He had no chance against that pipsqueak barbarian.
Ilianora said, “Listen, you louts, I’ll just lay out the details and let Little Daffy decide for herself.” She called Little Daffy from the cottage and made short work of it. “One. We’re probably wanted for aiding in the sabotage of the Emperor’s fleet of ships on Restwater. Two. They’ll guess we have the Grimmerie with us, since the damage done was substantial. Three. The Clock is broken, and we can’t rely on its advice. Four, the Grimmerie won’t open for us anymore, once it gave us its advice to go south. So we’re on our own.”
“South?” That was the only part that made Little Daffy blink. “The mud people? Munchkinlanders don’t venture into the clammy zone. Offends our sense of rectitude, both moral and hygienic. Why not west? I know some decent Scrowfolk who would hide us a while.”
“The advice was south,” said Brrr, “and that’s where we’re headed.”
“The advice was also to keep miles away from wretched girl-children,” interrupted Mr. Boss, “so this enterprise already starts off on a bad footing.”
“I’m going south, with the Clock or without it,” said Brrr, “so if you want to stay with the Clock and you want me to pull it for you, the matter’s settled. Little Daffy, join us or not, but make up your mind now.”
6.
The Munchkin woman decided in favor of adventure, to see if her marriage would hold. Before she left the woodcutter’s shed, she buried a spoon in the soil beside the doorsill. She explained: an old Munchkinlander custom before travel was undertaken. If you ever make it home, there’ll be something to eat with, even if the only thing left to eat is dirt.
“Lady Glinda could cook dirt,” said Rain.
Highsummer turned into Goldmonth, though Brrr insisted that up north the season was known as Tattersummer, for the fringing of the leaves by insects. Little Daffy countered that in Munchkinland these late summer days were called Harvest Helltime, as farmers struggled to get crops in before thunderstorms or the occasional dustbillow. “Munchkinland is losing acres of good soil to the desert every year,” she clucked. “If the EC really intends to polka on down and set up housekeeping, they’ll need a good broom.”
Rain listened to pictures more than people. Spoons in the ground, thunderstorms, dustbillo
ws. The use of a good broom. The complexity of the world’s menace was daunting, but perhaps she’d learn to read it as she had learned her letters. First step of reading, after all, is looking.
Eight-foot spiderwebs toward the southern edge of the oakhair forest. The Lion squealed whenever he stumbled into them, but Rain loved them. If she found them before they were battered by her companions, she looked through them, to see what she could see.
It was, indeed, like peering through a window. From one side, she was a human-ish enough girl looking in to the spider world. She saw spiders with short eyelashy legs and spiders with thoraxes like lozenges. Spider-mites with bodies so small you couldn’t even make them out, but who sported legs that could span a skillet.
Hello, little capery-leg. And how do you do today?
What Rain didn’t see, and she kept looking, was groups of spiders. Did spiders have attachments? Other than to their webs? She watched each silvery gumdrop sink on its strings, but when the spider climbed back up, nobody else was ever home. Any guests who blundered into their threaded nets became supper, which seemed unsociable.
Spiders had nerve, and speed, and art of a sort, but they had no friends. They didn’t go get married just like that.
From the other side of the web, being a spider, Rain peered back at the humans, to see in pictures what she could see.
For instance. The dwarf had called Ilianora “daughter” one time too many, so Little Daffy wondered if the veiled woman actually was his child. Ilianora was miffed. “Mr. Boss? Are you joking? My father was a prince, for all the good it did him.”
Everything looked like something. So what did this look like now? Mr. Boss looked like he’d been stung by a flying scorpion. His lips were blown out and bitten back.
Little Daffy looked suddenly ravished with interest by her fingernails.