The poppies near the wagon stirred, roiled, as of a wind along the ground, though there was no sign of any creature among their hairy twists of stem.
Ilianora’s voice issued, more steam than volume, the way that one attempts to scream in a dream but can’t get louder.
She tried to stagger forward herself, to help the girl in whatever new disaster this was. Her own limbs seemed locked, frozen, her mind slowed. Her carapaced form was hindered by the winding sheets of her veils.
Her utterance sounded hollow, and Brrr only snored on. The girl began to thrash. “Oh,” said Ilianora. It was the sound someone makes finding a common word in a surprising context. “Oh, hmmm.”
Before Rain could fall from the stage, though, or suffer a mental collapse right before Ilianora’s eyes, the poppies around the Clock of the Time Dragon whipped into frenzy. This time Ilianora could see the cause. As if swimming underneath the toxic tide, a school of rice otters approached through the greeny algae of poppy stem and leaves. The warm light silting through red petals turned their short fur greenish. Something happened that only Ilianora among the companions witnessed, unless Rain was watching too, behind her blanked-out eyes. A battle between the otters and an invisible foe. Ilianora couldn’t see the event, only its effects, as otters thrashed something silly, or the field of poppies thrashed itself. A blood that was not the stain of poppy dye ran from the mouths of otters.
Something was massacred in fifteen minutes, while Brrr hummed in his sleep and Little Daffy waved an inebriated fly from the canyon of her cleavage. Ilianora trembled as if in a gale. The petals ripped and shredded and blew about them. Eventually Rain began to soften, her paralysis to collapse, and she fell weeping on the stage floor.
But Ilianora couldn’t make herself move to comfort the girl. It was too horrible. She was frozen too.
By the time night fell, Ilianora was huddled against Brrr as he pulled himself up to a crouch. Little Daffy made some gloppy soup with a garnish of poppy pollen sprinkled on top. Mr. Boss was energized by the fact that the doors of the Clock had swung open, though once he refastened them they went right back into their old paralysis. Still, the fact they could still open seemed to be a useful kick in the butt. As he set to doing something of a tune-up, he whistled as he worked. Tunelessly.
“What happened?” asked Ilianora when the meal was done, and Brrr was cleaning the bowls with his tongue.
“Something was following us,” said Rain. “I don’t know what it was.”
“What did it look like? Soldiers?” asked Little Daffy.
“No. More like, um, spiders,” said Rain. “But more up-and-down than spread out. Their legs not so wide and curved like umbrella ribs, but more straight. Like what Murthy used to call a side table.”
Brrr said, “You had a dream of being attacked by a matched set of occasional tables? That reminds me of my setting up my first digs in Ampleton Quarters, back in the Shiz days. Green in judgment and all that. A case of nerves about being unpracticed at both sex and society was nothing compared to fretting that the wall hangings and the upholstery didn’t see eye to eye.” He knew he sounded berserk. He was trying to make light of Rain’s experience, whatever it had been.
“They wasn’t tables. They was beasties of some sort.”
“I suppose you took their names down, Rain, and all became quite cozy,” said Little Daffy. “You and your little party animals.”
“What did they want?” asked Mr. Boss. “You? Or the book?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t call ’em to me, but they came. They been following for a while I guess but I forgot to tell you.”
“Call me superior, but frankly I don’t think it’s likely you can see things we can’t,” said Little Daffy. “What were we saying earlier about conscience? In my day a girl who told tales would get a right smart spanking on her fanny.”
“You wasn’t looking. You was sunning.”
Ilianora roused herself. “Rain’s not pulling a fast one. I saw it happen. I saw something happen. Something came at the Clock, though whether it was for her or for the Grimmerie I don’t know.”
“They was the things that came to scrabble into the Clock the day I got locked in for safety,” said Rain. “The spiderish things from the jungle’s edge.”
The group fell silent. Brrr twitched his tail around exploratively, to see if it landed on something. No doubt he would scream like a schoolgirl if he touched … it. “Are they still here?” As baritone a voice as he could manage.
“They is all gone.” Rain began to cry a little. “I don’t know if they was good or bad or just hungry for something, but they is all gone. The rice otters got ’em.”
It was only then that they realized the rice otters had disappeared too. Hurried back to their swamp at last. All except for the one Rain had called Tay. It curled up on her lap and made itself at home, like a kitten. But its albino period was done. It looked like a mossy kitten entirely incapable of ripping a predator to shreds.
Brrr was consoled at the sight. He turned his attention to Ilianora, who continued to seem shattered at having witnessed an attack by an invisible foe. Anyone would be spooked by such a thing, he knew, but Ilianora—who shielded herself from notice by her veils—had been the one unlucky witness. She had withstood the opiate of the blossoms better than any of them. Why?
Well, she was sealed up, for one thing—actually and symbolically. That must be it. But having been protected by the suture, she was still vulnerable. The variety of despair brought on by panic and dread. She’d seen too much torture in her childhood. How well would she survive a genuine attack, one that had to be seen, that couldn’t be denied or filed away as delusion or fancy?
20.
The clouds skirted the bright moon in a well-behaved manner, so the companions pressed on through the Sleeve of Ghastille all night. They were eager to escape whatever the lure of poppies called up. Brrr, if he had put a name to it, would have said impatience with Ilianora.
Ilianora would have said panic, though panic had been dogging her footsteps since long before they entered the valley of the poppies.
Little Daffy regretted leaving such abundance of raw poppy material behind, but she went along grudgingly, making allowances for future needs.
Mr. Boss wanted his Clock to start working again.
Hugging Tay like a rag doll, Rain fell more silent than usual. She stayed closer to Brrr than to the others. He was the biggest even if the most squeamish.
Another day or two, another week, it was hard to tell, but things were improving. Maybe they were all just drying out after the wet year. Eventually other growth began to appear among the poppies—a stand of ferns here by the streamside, a clot of sunflowers. Then a few trees, the sort that can find a scrabblehold in sandy soil. The sound of birds up in the greeny shadows. Real birds at their private lessons, then flying high and free against outrageous blue.
The sandy road began to lead along a series of ridges. Brrr had to step carefully lest the ground begin to slide. Though not quite dunes, the slopes were certainly unstable.
Worrying about the apparent conspiracy of the world against the girl, whether Rain knew it or not, Ilianora was a mess of nerves. So Brrr wasn’t surprised when she lost it big-time one afternoon nearing sunset. Mr. Boss was just loosening the Lion from his tethers as the Clock perched on a sedgegrass knoll. Little Daffy was snipping some wild runner beans into a salad. Suddenly Tay set up a careering lollop as if bit by a stag-head beetle. The rice otter went plunging over the edge of the rise. Ilianora followed it with her eyes—more spiders?—to see Rain walking through grass forty, fifty feet down the steepening slope, toward a fell tiger of some sort who was emerging from the shadows of a copse of birches and terrikins.
“Brrr!” cried Ilianora, for she couldn’t sprint that fast, and the Lion could. Brrr was slow to twig, though. “Brrr! She has no fear!”
The Lion slewed about. He let out a roar more iconic than anything else, and he powered his haunches to
cover the ground between Rain and the interloper. The dwarf fell back as leathern straps snapped. Probably half-rotted from a year in Quadling Country. The cart inched as if to see for itself, and a curvet of sandhill gave under the rim of the forward wheel. The Clock went plunging down the slope after the Lion; after Rain.
Into this bowl of poppies, the last gasp of their color and prominence, Brrr pounded to the rescue, endangering the Clock. It was a false alarm—or false enough. The stalking creature was a Tiger with Spice Leopard markings. He knew her by the affectionate disregard that rose in her eyes as she turned at the sound of his approach; he knew her for his first love, Muhlama H’aekeem.
2I.
You always were rash. I wasn’t going to snack on her,” said Muhlama. She neither flinched nor flushed at seeing him again. As if he hadn’t been chased from her tribe by her chieftain father bent on vengeance—oh, all those years ago, twenty was it? As if Brrr had merely stepped out for an evening constitutional.
She was a matron Ivory Tiger now. Not given over to fat as some might have done, but sleek still. Markings about her cheeks had gone a silver that verged on purple. “I never took you for a pack Lion,” she added as Little Daffy and Mr. Boss, like stout grasshoppers, came hopping down the hill toward the Clock, which lay on its side, the dragon snout collapsed into its own poppy cushions, laid to rest.
“Get back, Rain,” growled Brrr. “Go to Ilianora. She’s having a fit up there.”
“I just wanted to…” Rain put out her hand, palm down, indicating something to Muhlama, but Brrr had no patience. He roared at Rain and she backed up, not so much horrified as, perhaps, embarrassed for him.
“I never thought I’d see you do that,” said Muhlama as the girl retreated. “Roar, I mean. Didn’t quite seem in your makeup. She’s only a human cub, of course. But that was relatively convincing. Have you gone on the stage?”
He couldn’t chitchat. “Were you going to harm her?”
“Why would I want to do that? Of course not. I’ve been looking for her. For you all. The aerial reconnaissance team finally located you after what, a year? I’ve been sent here to swim in the Field of Lost Dreams and drag you out by the scruff of your necks, if I needed to. You’ve been a long time making your way.”
“It’s quite a passage, this Sleeve of Ghastille.”
“You’re almost through. Two miles on there’s real grass. Let’s decamp there.”
“I have to see to the Clock.”
“Not much left of that, it looks like.”
They both soft-footed it over to the heap of split canvas and detritus. One wheel was spinning slowly like a roulette. Mr. Boss was pale, and Little Daffy was trying to fling her arms around him, but he was having none of it. “We’re over, we’re history,” he was saying. “Conscience dead, history buried.”
Rain sat down in the shadow of the wreck and draped one of the leather wings over her head, a tent of sorts. Ilianora stared at Brrr with fierce eyes as if something were all his fault. Well, he was used to that, but not in a while, and not from her.
“How bad is it?” he asked the dwarf. Mr. Boss was blubbering. So the Lion looked for himself.
The wheels on the right side had buckled so that the left side, the most prominent of the stage areas, was exposed to view like a corpse. The Clock’s last revelation? Brrr felt prurient to peer at it, but peer he did. They all did.
The shutters were flung wide. The proscenium had split at the top and its segments overlapped like misaligned front teeth. The red velvet curtain, fallen from its rings, draped off the front of the stage, a lolling tongue.
In the mouth of the Clock, its main stage, lay some composite material, papier-mâché perhaps, made up to look like stones. On one side of the stage they resembled boulders having avalanched down a cliffside, but on the other side they seemed more carved, as if to imitate the rusticated facades of great stone buildings.
The place didn’t look much like the Emerald City, nor like Shiz. Nothing like Qhoyre.
No, this looked like a foreign city-state. Maybe someplace in Ix or Fliaan, if those places even existed. Brrr had his doubts.
Or an imagined place. As if such places existed, either.
Bits and pieces of puppets lay strewn about, spilled into an effectively ropey sort of red, almost like poppy juice. No figure resembled anyone even marginally familiar. No stripe-stockinged witch crushed under a farmhouse. No corpse of baby Ozma bundled upside down into an open sewer. No costume, even, that anyone could identify—no Messiars or Menaciers from the military of Loyal Oz’s Home Guard, no cunning Munchkinlander folk getup for delighting tourists, no glamour gowns from palace balls. In their rictus, the puppets looked only like carved bits of wood and painted plasticine. The strings that held them in place lay snapped atop them. Dead, they convinced nothing about Death, except via the corollary that Life, perhaps, had always been made from scrap materials, and always would be.
“It’s an earthquake,” said Mr. Boss at last. He turned to Brrr. “You did this to it. You killed it.”
“She called out,” said the Lion. His use of the pronoun for his wife was the cruelest remark he had ever made, but he couldn’t help himself. “The girl comes before the Clock. As you should have known this last year, and some.”
“I told you we shouldn’t take her on!” The dwarf staggered about in a circle, beating his forehead with his fists. “The Clock saw the danger, and warned me against her!”
“I don’t cause earthquakes,” said Rain.
“Looks a heap of damaged goods to me,” said Muhlama.
Little Daffy found the Grimmerie a few feet away, lying where it had been pitched. Hidden in the shadow of the dragon’s ripped wing, as if the last act of the failing tiktokery had been to protect the magic book.
The Clock might be sprung at last, its mechanism despoiled after a century of charm, but the book remained closed to prying fingers.
“Let’s right the old lady, anyway, and see if we can cobble together a repair,” said Brrr. He wept a little, as if the dragon had been a companion too, and dissected one of its wings to remove a sallowwood humerus. With his little knife the dwarf fashioned enough of a substitute axle to manage.
They dragged the dead Clock through the last few miles of the Sleeve of Ghastille. In a shadowy meadow where the brook widened out, they paused to breathe the air less thick with poppy dust.
Brrr noticed it was autumn again. More than a year had passed since they had taken Rain from Lady Glinda. The twisted bows of pretzel puzzle trees were raging with hornets doing their anxious final dance. The leaves were falling, red and gold. They fell into the open mouth of the theater. When the sun began to set over the Great Kells and its light struck the stage, the earthquake event glowed as if it had been further plagued by a conflagration.
After a pick-me-up supper had been prepared and mostly ignored, and they were sitting around a small fire of their own, the company of the Clock without, it seemed, the Clock to cohere them, Brrr asked of Muhlama, “On whose agency have you been trying to rope us in? You weren’t a team player when last we met, as I recall.”
“Still not,” she said, yawning. “I’ve turned my back on my tribe, as you did on yours, Sir Brrr. But I never took up with humans. Yes, I’ve heard all about your later … accomplishments.” She had lost none of her power of condescension, he saw, almost affectionately. She continued. “I have no money on the matter of governments either way. I owe no loyalty to the grandees of the Emerald City or to the pipsqueaks of Munchkinland.” Little Daffy glowered at her in defense of her people, but Muhlama was impervious to a Munchkin glower.
“Someone sent you,” prompted Brrr.
“Someone asked me to come,” she agreed. “Someone said you might be in danger. I thought it might be amusing to watch. I had owed you something, after all.”
She had. Brrr’s dalliance with her had given her the alibi to leave the line of succession of the Spice Tiger camp. To escape the destiny of leadership h
er father, Uyodor H’aekeem, had required of her. Brrr saw that much more clearly now, since he too hadn’t been above using others as pawns for his own ambitions. “I was happy to help,” he said. “Way back then.”
“I made you happy to help,” she admitted. She flicked her tail in a way that reminded him of her seduction, the sordor of it, the ardor of it. But her tail was a commentary on Animal relations, not a come-on. “You freed me from my own prison. These years later, the moment arrived for me to try to do the same for you.” She looked sideways at Ilianora, who appeared as if carved out of ivory, staring at the flames, and added drily, “If that’s your wife, perhaps I didn’t come soon enough.”
“Tell us what you know,” he said. “Has the invasion by Loyal Oz been successful? Has Haugaard’s Keep fallen? Is the Emperor still blathering on his throne? It’s been a year since we’ve lost touch with the news.”
She limned it in quickly. “The Munchkinlanders defended their positions for as long as they could, but eventually they had to abandon the lake. All but the eastern fort. For a while it’s looked as if Loyal Oz will keep Restwater, requiring a retrocession of that edge of Munchkinland. Perhaps, folks said, to avoid further incursions, the Munchkinland Eminence would settle the matter, accepting the loss of the lake in exchange for political integrity of the rest of Munchkinland.”
“The EC only ever wanted water,” said the Lion.
“Not true. They also need the grain supplied by the breadbasket of Oz, in central Munchkinland,” Muhlama argued. “They need enough of a détente that commerce can begin again. There’s been a certain amount of unrest and deprivation in the Emerald City while Oz is engaged in this civil war.”
“So what’s the problem?” asked Brrr. “They sue for peace.”
“The Emperor,” said Muhlama, and yawned. “Shell Thropp. You remember him? I see you do. The younger brother of those sister witches, Elphaba and Nessarose. He has declared himself divine. He has promoted himself god.”