Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02 (7 page)

“And
that
isn’t a scary notion?”

“I am going to find myself here,” declared the Tin Woodman.

“I’m going to lose myself,” said the Lion.

“Just try to blend in,” said Dorothy. “Act natural.”

“Now that
would
be acting,” said the Tin Woodman, and barked one calf percussively against the other to underscore his point.

“Come on,” said the Scarecrow, “we’re in luck.” He indicated a motley crew of traveling players advertising a silly new show done mostly with puppets. They were amusing the guards, and in the commotion the Yellow Brick Road Irregulars and Liir managed to sidle undetected through the City’s west portal. They debouched into a broad square. Judging from the stink of skark manure, the space served as a holding pen for beasts of transport while cargos were being unloaded and bills of lading composed. Plain granite storehouses faced the yard, and bears—or possibly even Bears, talking beasts, though they weren’t talking now—were hauling sacks of grain and crates of produce. “Ho,” yelled the overseers. Some were Munchkins, a third the height of their laborers. Their landing whips loosed splatters as of red rain.

“We’re meat here, meat,” groaned the Lion. “Not that it’s all about me, but I feel so
exposed
.”

“The Lion’s right. Come, let’s duck down this alley,” said Liir.

“I’d expected a bit more fuss,” said Dorothy. “I mean, like it or not, the Witch is dead, and you’d think the word would have gotten out.” She held her own nose with one hand and Toto’s nose with the other. “Kansas boasts henhouses sweeter than this.”

They wandered through commercial districts, crossing wide boulevards lined with dying cypress trees. Some were splintered in half, pulled down for such tinder as they might provide. Many open spaces, around fountains memorializing successful military campaigns, were filled in with makeshift homes, some cardboard, or oilcloth stretched over chicken wire. Cooking pots stank of dinner. The broken spout from a fountain still trickled a little: a common toilet. “Ugh,” said Dorothy. “My earlier visit didn’t take me through this neighborhood.”

“You had civic guides,” guessed Liir. She nodded.

The people of the boulevards ducked behind the shawls tacked up as curtain-doors, or hid their faces in sheets of old newsprint when the travelers passed. “You’d think we were leprous,” said Liir.

“Perhaps we’re too clean,” said Dorothy. “We shame them.”

Liir didn’t think Dorothy was as clean as all that, but her eyes were bright and her step sure, and perhaps that counted more than cleanliness. “Maybe they’re used to police action against them, and they just don’t know which side we represent,” said Liir.

“Oh, really,” said the Tin Woodman. “Look at us: a man of straw, a man of tin, a Lion with a bow in his hair like a lapdog! A girl, a boy, a surly little dog. How could we possibly be authorities? We’re too—”

“Unique?” asked Dorothy.

“Lacking in camouflage?” asked the Lion.

“Fabulous?” proposed the Tin Woodman.

“Ridiculous?” asked Liir.

“All of the above,” decided the Scarecrow. But the indigent seemed not to be convinced and avoided the peculiar travelers.

W
HEN THEY REACHED
the great piazza before the Palace of the Wizard, Liir wanted to hang back. The Witch had despised the ruler of Oz; how could Liir show his face? “Don’t be a sissy,” said the Lion, “I’ve got that covered for us all.”

“It’s not fear,” said Liir, though it was, in part. It was also anger, he realized. How capable, how flexible anger was: he could feel it for the Witch, who had gone and died on him, and for the Wizard, the orchestrator of her murder, both at once. Then why, for Dorothy, did Liir feel nothing but an increasing exhaustion? Perhaps he harbored a zesty secret anger toward her, too, but if so it kept itself in disguise. If Liir lashed out at Dorothy—well, what would he have left in the world? Who? Pretty nearly nothing. Just about nothing at all.

“Well, we can’t wait while you dither,” said Dorothy. “You’d be a fool to pass up this chance. The Wizard can give you your heart’s desire, after all. He’s good at that.”

He remembered a conversation with Elphaba, suddenly.

“He’s like Santa Claus.” Dorothy’s eyes were button bright with apostolic zeal.

“Don’t know what you mean.”

“
Santa Claus?
Jolly old elf! Magic as anything. At Christmas every year he comes to your home and leaves you treats, if you’re good. Or if you’re not, coal in your stocking. We don’t always have extra coal in Kansas so once he filled my stocking full of manure. I cried like the dickens but Uncle Henry said it was punishment for me singing too brightly in the hog pen. I was scaring the pigs shitless, he said, and here was the proof.”

“The Wizard of Oz puts manure in your socks?”

“No! Listen and stop being an idiot. I just mean the Wizard is
like
Santa Claus: he’s a charitable sort. Come and get what you need. What’s to stop you? What do you have better to do?”

He wobbled. If the Wizard was handing out rewards, why shouldn’t Liir deserve one? He was an orphan now. He didn’t need to say who he was, did he?—or where he came from?

“He owes you lots.” Dorothy was solemn with assurance. “Without your help, we wouldn’t have gotten back alive. The creepy Yunamuffins hiding on the trail, that repulsive Elephant monster, queen of the Scrow-folk. I had jeebies crawling all over my heebies.”

“Maybe I will,” said Liir.

The Wizard couldn’t give him a father or a mother, but maybe he could give him some news of Nor. Now that the Princess Nastoya had awakened a hope that Nor might still be alive. Or maybe the Wizard had gotten hold of the missing Grimmerie, somehow. With it, Liir might figure out how to help the Princess shuck off her disguise. In any event, even to approach someone as mighty as the wonderful Wizard of Oz would be, for Liir, both a novelty and an accomplishment: he was hardly more than spinster spawn, and had seen little of the world of men.

“Well, come if you’re coming; we’re off,” said Dorothy, so Liir hid the Witch’s cape beneath an ornamental flowerpot in a corner of the deserted café where they had been sitting, and went with them.

Dorothy’s strategy for getting the attention of the proper officials at the Palace doors was simple. “I’m Dorothy,” she said, “you know.
The
Dorothy.”

The guards gawked. Ministers were summoned, and arrangements made for an interview almost at once. “You’re not allowed,” said the Secretary of Audiences to Liir. “You aren’t part of the original contract.”

“But I’m here to ask the Wizard for help,” said Liir.

“Piss off.”

Dorothy shrugged, grinned too broadly, and straightened her apron. “Don’t fret, Liir. We shouldn’t be more than an hour. All we have to do is show up, and I’m sure the Wizard will grant our requests. We’ll meet back at that café tonight and decide what to do to celebrate before I leave.”

“Are you sure you want to leave?” asked Liir.

“Of course I’m leaving,” she snapped. “This is my exit interview. Why do you think I put myself through this indignity? I didn’t ask to kill the Witch, but having done it, I’m going to collect my reward if I can possibly manage it.”

He bit his lip. “Then may I come with you?”

“You wouldn’t feel at home in Kansas. Few do. Besides, you’re supposed to be un-bewitching that old freak elephant noggin. Are my pigtails even?”

She kissed him in a bruisingly incidental manner. Full of stupid trust, she turned and hurried after her friends. The ceremonial doors banged behind them.

Liir went back to the café. Using up almost all the coin he had, he waited with mounting horror and then failing hopes. She never returned. He never saw her again.

She hadn’t been much, that Dorothy. Priggish, in a way, proud of her wide-eyed charity. Her kindness, at first magnificent, had come to seem a bit—well, cheap. After all, she’d also oiled the Tin Woodman, and soothed the timorous Lion, and discussed differences between the gold and silver standards of foreign currency with the Scarecrow, who seemed for all his brainlessness to be following the whole discussion. She’d cuddled that rank little dog of hers. In light of all that, her solicitousness to Liir seemed nothing more than the Next Good Deed.

Nonetheless, she had been brave, one foot in front of the other, all the way to the Vinkus, all the way back. When the bells began to toll throughout the City, and Liir finally worked up the nerve to ask someone why, Dorothy wasn’t mentioned at all. “The Wizard is deposed,” they said. “The Wicked Witch is dead, but the Wizard is deposed anyway. Some other good witch has been hired to oversee Oz in the interim.”

“Dorothy?” he asked. “What about Dorothy?”

“Dorothy who?” they replied. The cult of Dorothy had yet to take hold.

O
NCE, YEARS BACK,
in one of the barns at Kiamo Ko, Liir had been horsing about with Nor and her brothers. The children of Fiyero and his wife, Sarima, were high-tempered, and they had persuaded Liir to sit on one end of a timber that they intended to pivot out over a pile of hay below. He could jump to his safety! It would be fun, they said. And so it would have been, had not one of them—Manek, probably—leaped off the balanced end before Liir was fully positioned. Afraid of smashing himself on the stone floor of the barn, Liir had lurched to safety across the edge of a cart. The falling beam failed to kill him.

However, he knocked the wind out of his chest, and for a minute or two he was unable to breathe. He could feel his lungs kicking, and his heart kicking back, but he thought he was dying. The faces of Irji and Nor peered down over the edge of the loft at him. Lying on his back, stretching in vain to open his windpipe, he looked up at their faces contorting with laughter and mild concern.

What Liir remembered, in as near to extremis as he had experienced in his short life, was how embroidered these last few impressions of the world seemed. How the light breaking over the crowns of Irji’s and Nor’s heads seemed shaped like segments of overlapping fins, tying the bright expressions of his friends to the rafters, the cobwebs, the knotholes, the looped ropes, the stray feathers. All of a piece, all of a piece, he thought: why did I never see it before, and now I will die and never see it again.

Then he didn’t die, but lived. His breath punched itself back into place, and he wailed and his torso hurt and everything splintered into disjointed elements. As angry as he felt at Manek for making him the butt of a well-planned prank, he was distressed at the loss of his fine moment of apprehension: The world belonged together like this. The pieces related to each other. There was no contradiction, deepest down. Complexity, yes, but not contradiction. Only connection.

Now, hunched beneath the doorway of a shuttered butchery in the Emerald City, with Dorothy so newly met, and just as quickly vanished, he remembered the incident in the barn at Kiamo Ko. There is no resolving a good mess, he thought. Every breath one takes is a waking up into disjointedness, over and over.

He rocked hard enough to build plum-colored bruises on his shoulders. They hurt when he prodded them, and he prodded them to make them hurt.

He had nowhere to go, nothing to do. By day and night he meandered like the other bits of human trash that drifted up and down the boulevards. Filching from merchants, begging for pennies, relieving themselves in public without concern for decency or hygiene.

Nightly he returned to the café, in case his sense of dread had been for naught, and Dorothy might still make good on her promise and come back for him, at least to say good-bye. A lucky thing, too, for on the fifth day Liir was turning over newspapers looking for scrag-ends of butter pastry when he was tapped on the shoulder. He turned, half expecting that the café owner had summoned the police as he’d been threatening. Instead, Liir found the Scarecrow.

“You’re still here,” said the Scarecrow. “Somehow, I thought you would be.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s gone, you know that.” The Scarecrow sighed. “You knew she would go. She was a Visitor, not of our kind; that kind can’t stay, you know.”

“How do you know? Maybe you just need to invite them.”

The Scarecrow affected a superior attitude, and that was his only answer. “A lot is going to change in a very short time,” he said. “I hope it’s for the best, but it could get ugly in the interim. I thought it smartest to let you know. If I were you I would get out of town.”

“No one wants me,” said Liir, scoffing. “No one cares to come looking for
me
! No one knows who I am, not even myself. Do you mean that because someone tittered that the Witch was my mother, I’m in danger?”

“I don’t mean that,” said the Scarecrow. “I don’t know if anyone here knows or cares whether the Witch had children, or who they might be. I just mean there’s talk of a cleanup of this neighborhood.” He straightened up—he’d been limping, an odd thing for a Scarecrow—and cast his clumsy gloved hand down Dirt Boulevard, where the denizens of the evening were in their cups. A small crowd had gathered around a couple of half-naked teens making dirty right there on the ground. The tatterdemalions were pelting them with bits of food and egging them on. Elsewhere, bottles emptied of their beer smashed on paving stones. A baby cried piteously.

“What is happening?” said Liir.

“The Wizard has left, and Dorothy is gone, and Lady Glinda Chuffrey, née Arduenna of the Uplands, has been importuned to supervise a government until something more permanent can be arranged.”

“Glinda! I heard of her. The Witch used to talk about her sometimes. Well, she’ll do some good, won’t she?”

“Doing good, cleaning house, takes a mighty strong broom,” said the Scarecrow. “Speaking of which…”

The Scarecrow looked this way and that. The kids on the ground, wheezing and humping in their throes of lust, had secured the crowd’s full attention. The Scarecrow reached into his waistband and, hand over hand, drew out a stake. No, a pole—the handle of the broom. The Witch’s broom. Aha. Hence the limp.