Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (11 page)

She was sitting close enough to peer at the margins of the map. The outlying colonies and satrapies of Ugabu and the Glikkus. A few arrows pointing, variously, away, off margin, to countries across the band of deserts that isolated the giant Oz as competently as a ring of seas might, were seas anything other than a mystical notion of everlastingness.

Some sort of music began. She was dimly aware that the boys in their sunset robes had picked up nose whistles and cymberines, tympani and strikes. Someone drew a bow across a squash-belied violastrum. Someone lit a muskwax-taper that smeled of rose blossoms. To a man, the soldiers squatted, relaxing on their haunches; this was wel done enough to be convincing before it had even begun.

Cherrystone, she saw, was lighting a cigarette.

The dwarf gave a bow at the close of the prelude. The curtain rose on a lighted stage as the yard appreciably darkened by three or four degrees of violet.

A couple of figures strutted lazily onstage. What were they caled again? Homunculards. Puppets on strings. Marionettes, that was it. They were meant to resemble the Messiars and Menaciers squatting in the barnyard of Mockbeggar Hal, no doubt. They were hale and fit, and their ash limbs had been carved to exaggerate military physique. Waists tapered to pencil points, while biceps and buttocks and pectorals were al globular as oranges. Faces were blank but rosy-cheeked, and one chin had a sticking plaster across it, suggesting a soldier so young he was stil learning how to shave.

The two soldiers sauntered across the stage, looking hither and yon. Lights came up further to reveal the painted backdrop, which seemed to be a field of corn or wheat or cotton. A rough fence, a scarecrow, a few squiggles of bird painted in the sky across fat clouds in summersweet blue.

What craft the handlers showed! The puppet soldiers were bored. They whistled (how did they do that?). They kicked an imaginary stone back and forth. Funny how in the teling of it, thought Glinda, in the arc of the leading foot and the posture of the defense, the presence of the implied stone seemed as real, or even realer, than the puppet felows themselves.

The puppets soon tired of kick-the-pebble. They approached the front of the stage and looked out at the audience, but it was clear they weren’t peering at real soldiers in the gloaming. One of the carved Menaciers put a palm to his eyebrows as if shielding it from sun while he scanned the horizon. The other knelt down and dipped his hand a little below stage level, and the audience heard the sound of water swishing about. The puppet guard was meant to be on the shores of Restwater.

From offstage a melody started up, a saucy two-step in the key of squeezebox. The soldiers looked at each other and then off to one side. On came a line of dancing girls with high-stepping legs, bare to the knee and venturing quite a bit of thigh. In the porphyrous barnyard, General Cherrystone’s soldiers roared and applauded the arrival of this squadron of hoofers. Wel, they were cheery, Glinda had to agree. And so smart! Eight or nine dancers. Their dresses, sequinned and glittery, were made of silvery blue tule netting stitched from the hip of the first dancer on the left al along to the last dancer on the right. Their kicks were so uniform they were no doubt managed by a single lever or puley of some sort. Offstage, some of the musicians were hooting out in falsetto as if the dancers were catcaling the men, “Heee!” and “What ho!” and “Oooh la la!” and “Oz you like it!”

Then, through some sleight of theater that Glinda couldn’t work out, they’d turned back-to-front somehow. The vixens put their hands to the floor and their legs in the air, and their skirts fel down over their bosoms and heads, revealing pink panties that looked, from here, like real silk. Their costumed behinds faced the audience. Each one of the girls had a bul’s-eye painted on her smals.

The soldiers in the barnyard roared their approval. Glinda noticed that the two puppet Menaciers had disappeared. Wel, who needed male puppets when females were available?

You could no longer make out the heads of the dancers, nor even their legs. The blue netting seemed to be rising and thickening; there was more and more of it, until al that was left were nine pink behinds bobbing in a sea of blue.

Thank mercy she had left Miss Murth at home, she thought, as—oh sweet Ozma—the dancers somehow dropped their drawers. The pink sleeves slid under the waves, and on each of the nine bobbing unclefted arses a different letter was painted.

R-E-S-T-W-A-T-E-R
.

The articulate rumps quickly disappeared beneath the blue waves of the lake. The audience booed good-naturedly. But Glinda noticed that the smel of roses had given over to a smel of smoke.

From wing to wing, across the back of the stage, some long slit in the floor must have opened, for the dancing girl puppets and then their drowning lengths of blue skirt drained within the aperture. Their disappearance revealed one of the soldiers from earlier. His face had been smudged with coal dust, his clothes as wel. He carried in his hand a torch. The fire was made of orange flannel lit from within; a spring-wound fan made the flames dance to the same melody that the girls had jigged to.

Oh, thought Glinda suddenly, as the smel of smoke intensified. Oh dear.

The aperture opened again and up from beneath the stage rose a stiffened flat. It was in the shape of a hil, the same shape as the hil on the backdrop, and very soon it stood in front of the backdrop, blocking the view of Highsummer crops. The hil was denuded of crop, and blackened. The scarecrow was a scorched skeleton with holows for eyes.

The second soldier came on, and the two companions returned to the shore of Restwater. Somehow while the audience had been distracted by the rising dead hil, a segment of the stage had slid forward, like the broad bowed front of a shalow drawer. From the recesses flashed scraps and humps of the costumes of the dancing girls, now clearly signifying the waves of Restwater. Then—oh, horrid to see!—from the surface of the tule-water emerged the head of the Time Dragon itself. Its eyes glowed red; its scissoring jaws seethed with smoke.

The two soldiers waded in the water, one on either side of the puppet Dragon, and they clasped their arms around its neck. They fel to kissing the creature as if it were one of the dancing girls, and as its smile turned into a leer, it sank beneath the waves, dragging the two soldiers with them. They couldn’t pul away. They courted the dragon with affection until they drowned.

“Enough!” barked Cherrystone in the dark, but he hadn’t needed to say this. The lights were going down and the music fading upon a weird, unresolved chord.

The barnyard fel silent. The dwarf came around from the back of the Clock and gave a little skip and a bow and a flick of his teck-fur cap.

Glinda stood and applauded. She was the only one until she turned and made a motion with her hands. Then the men joined in, grumblingly and none too effusive.

Improvising, she walked over to Cherrystone and pretended she couldn’t read his ire. “Would you care to join the troupe of entertainers back at the house for a light refreshment before they go on their way?”

He didn’t answer. He began barking orders to his men.

She couldn’t resist fluting after him, “I’l take that as regrets, but do feel free to change your mind if you’re so inclined.” Then she cocked her head at Mr. Boss and indicated Mockbeggar Hal’s forecourt.

II.

My, but Cherrystone needed to sort out his men. They seemed bothered by the turn toward tragedy that the episode had taken. Clever little dramaturg, thought Glinda, sneaking a glance at Mr. Boss and his associates as they dragged the Clock of the Time Dragon across the forecourt of Mockbeggar.

Puggles had rushed ahead to light a few lanterns and arrange for a beverage. But Mr. Boss said, “There’s no time. We have to get out quickly before your General Mayhem arrives to put us under lock and key.”

“But you’re my guests,” said Glinda.

“Fat distance that’l get us, when you’re in durance vile yourself.” He turned to the Lion. “Brrr, guard the gateway, wil you? If you can manage to look menacing, you might hold off the law for a valuable few moments.”

“Menacing isn’t my strong suit,” said the Lion. “How about vexed? Or inconvenienced.”

Glinda recognized the voice, dimly. Not the famous Cowardly Lion? Doing menial labor for a bunch of—shudder—theater people? She had made him a Namory once, hadn’t she? “Sir Brrr?” she ventured.

“The same,” he replied, “though I drop the honorific when I’m touring.” He seemed pleased to be recognized. “Lady Glinda. A pleasure.”

“To your station, ’fraidycat,” snapped the dwarf. Brrr padded away. The brittle woman in the veils went with him, one hand upon his roling spine. In the lamplight he looked quite the golden statue of a Lion, regal and paralyzed, and his consort like some sort of penitent. The lads in orange were stil strapping up the Clock and securing it.

“I have been trying to think of where we met,” said Glinda. “I ought to have kept better notes.”

“You ever intend to write your memoirs,” the dwarf said, “you’re going to have to make up an awful lot. Maybe this wil remind you.” He motioned to the young men to stand back. They looked singularly strong, stupid, and driven. Ah, for a stupid young man, she thought, losing the thread for a moment. Lord Chuffrey had been many wonderful things, but stupid he was not, which made him a little less fun than she’d have liked.

The dwarf approached the Clock. She couldn’t tel if he pressed some hidden mechanism or if the Clock somehow registered his intentions. Or maybe he was merely responding to
its
intentions; it seemed weirdly spirited. “The next moment,” he murmured, “always the next moment unpacks itself with a degree of surprise. Come on, now.” The section of front paneling—from which the lake of blue tule had sweled—slid open once more. There was no sign of the dragon head, the drowned Menaciers, the rustling waves. The dwarf reached in and put his thwarty hands on something and puled it out. She recognized it at once, and her memory snapped into place.

Elphaba’s book of spels. Glinda had had it once, after Elphaba had died; and then the dwarf had come along, and Glinda had given it to him for safekeeping.

“How did you persuade me to give it to you?” Her voice was nearly at a whisper. “I can’t remember. You must have put a spel on me.”

“Nonsense. I don’t do magic, except the obvious kind. Fanfares and mistaken identities, chorus lines and alto soliloquies. A little painting on black velvet. I merely told you that I knew you had the book of spels, that I knew what was in it, and that I knew your fears about it. I’m the keeper of the Grimmerie. That’s my job. If not to hoard it under my own protection, then to lodge it where it wil do the least harm.” He held it out to her. “That’s why I’ve come. It’s your turn. This is your payment for our service tonight. You wil take it again. It’s time.” She drew back, looked to make sure that Cherrystone wasn’t approaching from the barns or the house itself. “You’re a mad little huskin of a man, Mr. Boss. This is the least safe place for the Grimmerie. I am incarcerated here.”

“You wil use it,” he said, “and you must use it.”

“I don’t respond to threats or prophecies.”

“Prophecy is dying, Lady Glinda. So I’m going on a hunch. Our best thinking is al we have left.”

“My best thinking wouldn’t boil an egg,” she told him.

“Look it up. This thing is as good a cookbook as any you’re likely to find. Come on, sister. Didn’t Elphaba trust you once to try? It’s your turn.”

“I don’t mention her name,” said Glinda. Not coldly, but in deference.

“Shal I leave you the Lion to help you protect the book?”

“I am not alowed pets.”

Brrr, circling the court and sniffing for trouble, gave a low growl.

“Sorry. I’m flustered. I meant to say staff. I have a skeletal crew on hand to look after me, but I think you need the Lion’s services more than I do.”

“His services aren’t much to speak of,” said the dwarf. The boys laughed a little nastily. They were Menaciers themselves, she saw, just in a different uniform, serving a different commander. She wanted nothing to do with any of them.

“When I saw you once before,” she told Mr. Boss, “you were on your own. You didn’t have this extravagance of tiktok mechanics at your heels.”

“Once in a while I park the Clock in secrecy when the times require it. That instance, as I recal, I was making a little pilgrimage on foot. I told you that I knew you had the Grimmerie, and what was in it. I told you things about Elphaba that no one could know. That’s how I convinced you to relieve yourself of the Grimmerie then, before Shel Thropp had acceded to the Throne and approached you, intending to impound the book. I trust he did make that effort?”

She nodded. The dwarf had predicted events quite cannily. Thanks to him, she’d had nothing to show Shel, not in the palace treasury nor in her private library, not in Mennipin Square nor in Mockbeggar Hal. She’d been clean of this dangerous volume.

And now, Cherrystone breathing down her throat every day, she was expected to take it back again? To hide it in plain sight?

“Are you working to set me up for execution?” she hissed.

“I never talk about the end game.” He winked at her. “I’ve lived so long without death that I’ve stopped believing in it.” From the shadows of the great Parrith onyx pilars with strabbous inlay, the Lion spoke. “Things are settling down now. Campfires being lit, men sorted out. We don’t have much time.”

“Please,” said Mr. Boss to her. “And I don’t say please often.”

Glinda kept her hands tucked under her arms. She looked up at the dark windows of Mockbeggar. If she took this book, she wanted to make certain that Miss Murth and Puggles and Chef were ignorant of it. She didn’t want to put them under any more danger than necessary.

There was no sign of a shape at the windows. Or was there? Perhaps a little thumbnail of darkness at a lower pane. Surely Rain was off and asleep?

The spooky woman in the veil hesitated, but then left the Lion’s side to approach Glinda. The lamplight etched shadows from her veil along the sides of her face, but Glinda could make out her strong thin nose and ful lips and a shock of white hair, odd in one who seemed otherwise so young. A wasting ailment, perhaps. Her skin was dark, like a woman from the Vinkus. “We do not play at intrigue,” she said to Glinda. “We work to avoid it wherever we can. But I ask you. Do this for Elphaba. Do this for Fiyero.”