Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02 (8 page)

He gave it to Liir. “No one wanted it,” he said. “No one needed it for anything. It served its purpose and was going to be thrown out.”

Liir accepted it with resignation; one more thing to carry back to the home he no longer had. “What do you mean, things are going to get ugly? Seems to me they’re pretty ugly around here already.”

“Well, I mean, for the ceremony of Glinda’s elevation, they’ll have to relocate the urban poor. For one thing. Glinda’s quite tidy and likes things just so.”

“You seem to know a lot all of a sudden. The brains are working?”

“There’s talk that Lady Glinda will eventually yield, and put a wise Scarecrow on the throne,” the Scarecrow said, pride—or derision—making his voice sound odd. “After she cleans up the Wizard’s affairs. And there are those who think that the charmed child Ozma will be located in some cave almost at once, now that the Wizard’s gone. Sounds cynical and desperate to me, but what do I know of government? I’ve had more access to information the last few days than the rest of my life put together.”

“A wise Scarecrow on the throne?
You?
” said Liir, incredulous. “Sorry, I don’t mean to imply—”

“I,” said the Scarecrow, “or someone like me. Frankly, to human beings, all Scarecrows look the same, which is odd, since we seem to be much more individual than humans. But we’re made in their image and likeness, so all they see in us is themselves, and one mirror is as good as another, I guess.”

“Do you want to be king? Now that you’re so smart?”

“Now that I’m so smart, I know enough not to let on what I want,” said the Scarecrow. “We should move away from here, you know.”

Liir roped the heavy cape around his arms and took the scorched broom. “Any ideas?”

“Just—away. This is all so unseemly.” The Scarecrow indicated the throng. “You’re very young for all this.”

“You’re younger than I,” said Liir.

“I was born old,” said the Scarecrow. “That’s how I was made.”

“I don’t know how I was made,” said the boy. “That’s part of my problem.”

They crossed a small canal into a quieter street and came to rest on a fundament to which ranks of small private barges and blunt-boats were tied up for the night. The smoke of cooking fires, the smell of boiled beans and potato stew hung in the air.

“I miss Dorothy,” he said.

The Scarecrow replied, “It’s the Witch you miss, isn’t it?”

“I hated her too much to miss her.”

“That’s what you think.”

“You think your own thoughts, and leave me mine.” He was outraged at the presumption. “What did you know of the Witch? Auntie Witch? Elphaba Thropp? She was my…she was my witch!”

The Scarecrow paid no attention. “It’s starting, listen,” he said. He held up his hand. The sounds from Dirt Boulevard had altered; a percussion of horses’ hoofs, hundreds of them, came thrumming forward, a scatter of shouts turning into screams. “I waited too long,” the Scarecrow said. He bundled Liir onto the nearest canal boat. A bearded old coot with a sawed-off hand turned and raised a hot skillet at the Scarecrow, but the Scarecrow deflected it with his gloved fist, and the man tumbled into the filthy water. “Loosen the mooring, push away,” said the Scarecrow, “the neighborhood will be in flames by dessert time.”

2

C
ANDLE PUT DOWN
the domingon to rest. Her fingers were swollen with long red welts. She’d been working hard. The young man—they called him Liir, was it?—breathed shallowly, but regularly. And he hadn’t twitched a muscle in the hours since Candle had started playing to him.

At the sound in the doorway, she turned. She expected the Superior Maunt, but it was her grouchy kitchen boss, Sister Cook.

“
Someone
landed a cushy job where she can sit all day,” said Sister Cook, without real resentment, but she had eyes only for the victim. Hardly nightfall the first day, and the maunts in the cloister of Saint Glinda couldn’t curb their curiosity. “He’s not much to look at, is he?”

Candle made a soft sound in her throat, a kind of purr. A demur? Sister Cook wasn’t sure. She knew Candle to be capable of following instructions, so whatever the girl’s limitations were, they didn’t include deafness or lack of language understanding. She just didn’t speak up; with her it was mostly glottal molasses.

Sister Cook wrinkled her nose, as if considering the merits of a joint selected for the holiday roast. A gauze sheet, nearly transparent, casting lavender shadows on the lad’s near naked form. The coverlet was woven tightly, affording warmth, and was light enough to be whisked away when medical attention was required. As the evening came in, the blood blisters under the skin on this face looked like medallions of honor—or maybe the sites of subcutaneous leech colonies.

“I came to make sure you were all right,” said Sister Cook at last, having taken her fill. She turned back to Candle. “Here. We all must do our part.”

She pulled from her apron pocket a long red frond, fringed with airy, asparagus-fern stamens. Candle started, and the sound in her throat was clearly revulsion.

“Not to worry, it was a willing sacrifice,” said Sister Cook. “I was alone in the yard mincing the cord onions when that Red Pfenix appeared again. He was distraught. He’d been attacked and wounded by something; he was bleeding from the throat and couldn’t speak.”

Candle shrugged and hit her chest with her hand, turning it outward.

“Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire hate to administer to Animals, you know that,” said Sister Cook. “But it doesn’t matter. They couldn’t even if directed to. The Superior Maunt sent them away after lunch. Off on some investigative mission about those Emerald City novices who had their faces scraped. So what was I to do?”

Candle reached out and touched the Pfenix feather.

Sister Cook said, “Nearly shorn of life, he came back here. He pulled out his axial feather himself and walked up to me with it in his beak. Swans sing when they die; Pfenix do, too, but he couldn’t. So you make music for him, please. Out of respect; we’re having Pfenix breast tonight.”

Sister Cook shoved both her hands in her apron pockets. “Pfenix breast, though I’ve diced them small and disguised them as chicken fingerlings so our dear old Mother Rush-to-Judgment doesn’t have a conniption stroke. Don’t forget to come down when you hear the dinner bell; we don’t get Pfenix around here very often, Animal or otherwise.”

She lingered a moment longer and watched Candle hold the red feather. It was almost two feet long and still retained some of its vital elasticity. “Well?” said Sister Cook. “I can’t stand here forever. Play a dirge for the Pfenix, who never made it to his Convention or his class reunion or wherever he was going. He was interested in your playing, I saw. Honor him by accepting his gift.”

Candle tried to remember what she had seen of the domingon when it was played by its maker. She had swooned, for music or love or both, and in her exhilaration, maybe she’d overlooked an aspect of the instrument’s construction. Maybe it had had a pfenix feather, and the master had removed it—pfenix feathers weren’t easy to come by. And a Pfenix feather, freely given besides! What she might learn to play now.

She leaned down and laid the quill end of the feather against the empty notch at one end of the domingon’s lower soundboard. It settled in perfectly, as if the domingon had been built to accommodate this exact feather. Then Candle gently coaxed the feather flat. There was a hasp at the soundboard’s far edge, a leather tooth on a sprung hinge that clamped down hard to hold the pinion end of the tailfeather in place.

Candle turned the pegs, listening to calibrations of tuning too precise for Sister Cook to appreciate. Then Candle flung out both her hands at Sister Cook: Go! Go!

“Ungrateful, the both of you,” said Sister Cook. As she descended the stairs, she heard the first few notes of an exquisite instrument being played by an expert. So suddenly it took her back to school days—when she was a nervous slip of a thing at Madame Teastane’s Female Academy, not the cow she’d become—that she had to steady herself against the wall. She was thirteen, and suffering her first menses. Coming back from a dawn visit to the cold lavatories on the third floor, she’d spotted a red pfenix on the roof of the Master’s lodge. The trees had been airy, just budding, struck with first light, and the bird had looked like red cloisonné set in warm stone. A stab of loveliness unmerited, unexpected. It had cheered her then. She continued down the stairs back to the mauntery’s kitchens, cheered again at the long-forgotten thought, though perhaps she was also happy to anticipate a fine, fine meal that night.

1

T
HE
S
UPERIOR
M
AUNT
made it her business to get to the infirmary on a daily basis. She didn’t like what she saw. The young fellow made no discernible progress; indeed, a yellowish sweat rolled off him, hinting of turps. His skin was cold to the touch. He was still breathing, however.

“You may wipe him down when he becomes too clammy,” she said to Candle, and showed her how. The girl seemed reluctant to touch her charge, but did as she was bade.

Holy intuition, the Superior Maunt felt, did not figure among her own administrative talents. She was a common-sensist. She thought the Unnamed God had given her a brain to use, not to ignore as a snare of the devil. She had tried to lift herself up by clear thinking, and others, too, when she could.

Nonetheless, it was intuition as much as charity that had inspired her to call for a musician. This Candle seemed perfect: demure, even of temper, and increasingly proficient at her instrument.

The Superior Maunt wasn’t overly worried that whatever had befallen Liir—whatever it was, those bruises, those broken bones!—would afflict her pair of investigators. The young missionaries from the motherchapel in the Emerald City, whose faces had been scraped—the boy himself—were possessed of the loveliness of youth, youth’s fine ignorance of its own fleeting grace. The same couldn’t be said of Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire. Through long years of dedication and hard work, they had grown wizened and doughy, respectively. They would be safe from the attention of those who wanted to despoil the innocently beautiful. And their training in medicine had fostered keen observational skills; they could protect themselves, if anyone could.

The Maunt Superior noted that though her hearing wasn’t good anymore, the music of the repaired domingon had a way of traveling. The entire mauntery was filled with its soft phrases. Sister Linenflaxen said it was elegiac, damn it, Candle was wooing the lad to his final sleep. She should play something peppier. Everyone else said
shhhh
. The whole place had fallen under a sort of spell. They were waiting to see what would happen, but the music made them patient.

Sister Graveside ironed a fresh winding cloth and refilled the corked jug with anointing oil, to be ready.

C
ANDLE WAS MORE OBSERVANT
than the Superior Maunt credited, though. She could see that Liir’s respiration responded to her choice of music. He went through periods of rhythmic breathing, like someone sleeping peacefully enough, followed by patterns of shallow flutterbreath.

Restored to glory by the feather of the Pfenix, the domingon had become responsive: the harmonic overtones hung in the air and complemented one another. When the invalid seemed too agitated, she would bring him back with long furling phrases. But too many of those and she was afraid he would deliver his last, deep outgo and breathe in no more: and then he would be dead. So she would agitate him with pizzicato comments and thumb-struck flat-tone responses, to alert his lungs and stimulate his heart.

She was guiding him. She knew it. She just didn’t know where he was.

L
IIR WAS IN THE STOLEN BLUNT-BOAT
with the Scarecrow, heading along one of the waterways of the Emerald City. It was a week or two after the Witch had died. There was trouble behind, and darkness ahead, but the windows of the town mansions that lined the canal—one flight above street level, above the barricaded stables and stout front gates—threw trapezoids of gold light onto the stinking canal water. Liir and the Scarecrow passed in and out of one another’s view.

“What
will
you do?” asked the Scarecrow. “Where will you go?”

“I have no place to go,” said Liir. “I’m not going back to Kiamo Ko. Why should I? Only old Nanny there.”

“Have you no obligation to her?”

“
Now
you ask me? In a word, no. Chistery will mind her well enough.”

“The Snow Monkey? Yes, I suppose he will. Well, the story of Dorothy is done. We won’t see her like again.”

“And a good thing, too,” said Liir. “Off and away with the fairies, just like that, and not so much as a decent good-bye!”

“Her departure was precipitous,” agreed the Scarecrow. “Glinda made the arrangements in something of a hurry.”

The light from a party, candles laid out on a balustrade. The music wafting out open doors: agitated phrases, comments and responses, from some instrument with multiple voices, or many instruments playing very close together. Haunting!

The Scarecrow said, “Don’t fasten on Dorothy. Only unanswerable longing lies down that road. Gone is gone.”

“How wise you are, now that you’re packed with brains. Everyone got some party favor from the Wizard except me. Everyone’s got somewhere to go.”

“Don’t look to me for a map, Liir. Figure it out for yourself. What about your friend, Nor? That Princess Nastoya seemed to think she might still be alive. Maybe you could find her.”

“First I better learn a trade and find a way to support myself. Or watch how the pickpockets practice their trade. Sure, I would like to find Nor, but I’d like to fly, too. Not bloody likely without some help.”

“I can’t be much help.”

“Too highly connected now, I’m sure. Too chummy with the chief cheeses.”

“I have my own plans. Appointments to keep. I’m out of here as soon as I can.”

“I thought that Glinda person had singled you out for a lead position in the government. That’s what they’re saying on the streets, where I pick up my news and other garbage.”

“Lady Glinda doesn’t confide in me. I’ve heard she intends to rule for six months or so, and then abdicate in favor of a straw man. Who?—well, as I’ve admitted, one scarecrow is as good as another. Do you think anyone would notice the difference? When a scarecrow blows apart in a gale wind, the farmer just props up another one. It’s the job to be done that’s important, not who does it.”

“That’s what they used to say at the mauntery,” said Liir. “If a maunt dies and goes to the Afterlife, another maunt comes to take her place. Like replacing a pane of glass. It’s the work that’s important, not the individual who does it.”

“Well, I’m keeping my own counsel about my plans,” said the Scarecrow, “and I’m not long for the Emerald City, I’ll tell you that much. One day you’re a celebrity, the next day you’re hauled off to jail.”

They contemplated this as they came upon a weir. From here, a system of locks stepped the water level down steeply until it disappeared into a fortified grate. Above, armed members of the Emerald City Guard were having a smoke around a brazier. “Better not get their attention,” said the Scarecrow.

“What’s over there, that the canal is guarded?” whispered Liir as they regarded their situation.

“Not sure. Couldn’t say. But it might be Southstairs.”

“Southstairs? What’s that?”

The Scarecrow made a face in the gloom. “The high-security prison for the heartland. Don’t you know anything? I’ve only been here a week and I know that.”

“Why would they be guarding the canal grate?”

“Who knows? Maybe they’re afraid there’ll be a move to liberate Southstairs. I’m told a lot of professional Animals ended up there over the decades, cheek by jowl with murderers, pedophiles. Rapists. Political pamphleteers.”

“The Wizard’s gone. Why aren’t they just throwing the gates open?”

“You want the murderers and rapists back in the neighborhood?”

“Well—no. No, but for the dissenters.”

The Scarecrow frowned. “Dream on. Who’s going to take it upon themselves to decide which is which at this point? The job of personal fiscal betterment is far more urgent.”

“Hard to argue with that. And I bet the suppressed Animals agree with you. Are they on the move, do you know? Or hanging low until they see what develops?”

“Look, I got you safely away from Dirt Boulevard before you were swept up in a purge. I’m not going to deliver you to Southstairs so you can check on the Animals there. Let’s turn about.”

The Scarecrow piloted the blunt-boat backward until there was room enough to swing it around. Their route took them back under the balustrades where the fancy-dress ball was in progress. The laughter was more unguarded, even strident, the music brassier. “Lots to celebrate these days, for those of the right station,” said the Scarecrow. “Good news indeed. Could be another Victory Gala.”

“Celebrating the Wizard’s departure?”

“Celebrating the Witch’s death,” said the Scarecrow. His face was impassive. “Oh, sweet Oz, it’s Glinda’s house!” He tucked his head down. “Liir!”

“She doesn’t know me,” said Liir. He scrambled backward along the boat to its squared-off stern, a small elevated platform for the loading of goods. Craning, he could see a woman leaning her hips against the carved stone balustrades of the balcony. The light from the ballroom fell on her golden hair, which was swept up on her head in a bubbly mass of curls hooped by a diamond tiara. He couldn’t see how old she was, nor her expression, for her face was turned away. She was trim and fit, though her shoulders were slumped—grief, or despair? Or boredom? She dabbed a handkerchief at her nose.

Liir didn’t speak, he didn’t call out—what did he care for Lady Glinda Chuffrey? Auntie Witch had mentioned her only in passing. Sometimes with grudging respect, more often with disapproval. As he watched her, something echoed along the waters of the canal, a sound—as if a private, smoky slide of music accompanied their blunt-boat, counterpoint to the party pandemonium.

Lady Glinda turned, and gripped the rail with both hands, and leaned over as their vessel was slipping beneath a pedestrian bridge. “Shit!” hissed the Scarecrow, and stayed the boat in the shadows by throwing his weight against the pole. “She’s seen us!”

“Who is it?” called Glinda. “Who’s there?—I almost thought—”

Liir wanted to speak up. The Scarecrow clapped a gloved hand against his mouth tightly. Liir struggled, elbowed the Scarecrow, but he wasn’t strong enough to break free before Glinda shook her head as if in disbelief, straightened the epaulets on her ball gown, and returned to her affair.

“What’s the matter with you?” railed Liir, when the Scarecrow had let him go.

“What’s the matter with
you
?” said the Scarecrow. “I’m trying to keep a low profile in order to help you, and you have to go and signal the heads of state and alert them about it?”

“I didn’t signal her!”

“Well, she must have a sixth sense then, for she turned, and she saw you.”

“She doesn’t know who I am. She doesn’t know I exist!”

“And let’s keep it that way.”

2

T
HE ANIMOSITY THAT OBTAINED
between Sisters Doctor and Apothecaire subsided once dusk fell on their first evening away from the Mauntery of Saint Glinda. The women erected the frame of thin skark ribs and fixed the waterproof awning to it. Then they huddled together under a blanket. When the wolves of the oakhair forest howled their midnight requiem, the Sisters mangled their devotions into such a gabble of syllables and sobs that, had the Unnamed God been condescending to listen, it could only have concluded that its two emissaries were afflicted with sudden-onset glossolalia.

“The Superior Maunt thought it safe to send us out on an exploratory mission even though the faces of those three young missionaries had so recently been scraped,” said Sister Apothecaire the following morning, which dawned damp and windless. “I trust her in every particular,” she added fiercely, unconvincingly.

“Our charge is clear,” said Sister Doctor, “safety or no. We are to make an effort to address the tribal Scrow, if we can locate them, and certainly the Yunamata. We must enquire about the disaster that struck those missionaries. With the conviction of our faith in the Unnamed God, no harm will befall us.”

“Do you propose the missionaries were in greater danger because their faith was weak?” asked Sister Apothecaire.

Sister Doctor’s lips became thinner as she folded the awning away. “Cowardice, said the Superior Maunt, will not serve us in this task.”

Sister Apothecaire relented. “Cowardice is a dubious attribute. Yet I possess it in spades, so I hope on this venture to learn how to use it to my advantage if I must. All gifts come from the Unnamed God, including cowardice, and self-repugnance.”

The mules dropped their heavy hoofs on the path, picking a way between ranks of thin trees with branches nearly empty of leaves. Little cover.

“Perhaps,” said Sister Doctor, “the Superior Maunt sent
us
out because we would be better able to tend to each other, medically, were we attacked.”

“If we survived. Well, I’ve no doubt that our skills here in the wilderness will prove useful. After all, I do speak a dialect of West Yumish.”

“When you’ve had a bit too much seasonal sherry.”

They laughed at that and proceeded in companionable silence until Sister Apothecaire couldn’t stand it. “Now Liir is Candle’s responsibility. Funny little thing. What can she bring to Liir that we can’t?”

“Don’t be stupid. She can bring youth and charm, if she can get his attention. She can give him a reason to survive. This is something neither you nor I could do. If he opened up his eyes after a long coma and saw either of us right off, he’d probably kick the bucket in a nonce.”

Sister Apothecaire did not murmur assent. She was rather proud of her looks. Well, her face, anyway; her figure was regrettably lumpy. “Perhaps,” she said distractingly, “Candle has a natural talent that the Superior Maunt can sense.”

“What sort of talent?” Sister Doctor shifted in her saddle and turned to peer at her colleague. “You don’t mean a talent for magic? That’s distinctly forbidden in the order.”

“Come come. You know perfectly well we resort to it when we must. Not that we’re very good at it. I need hardly remind you that these are dangerous times. Perhaps the Superior Maunt thinks that in the rehabilitation of the boy, such a talent is called for.”

By the straightening of her spine Sister Doctor signaled that she did not intend to second-guess the Superior Maunt’s motives. Sister Apothecaire regretted having brought it up. “Well,” she continued, falsely jolly, “I don’t have much of a sense of Candle one way or the other. If she’s got common magic or common sense, it’s news to me either way.”