Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (27 page)

“They saw a dragon close up, and I en’t seen nothing but spiders?” Rain was incensed.

“But if we stay on this road—they’l be folowing us,” persisted Brrr.

“No road goes only one way. When engineers to build the only dry access
into
Quadling homeland, they also build only dry access
out
of Quadling homeland. So when EC soldiers betray Quadling hosts and kil and steal and burn their bridges? EC soldiers walking away on Yelow Brick Road make easy target for Quadling dart and Quadling arrow.” He spat out a mushroom bug and cursed in Qua’ati.

“Quadlings not to kissy kiss EC soldiers any more.”

“What’s to stop your countrymen from shooting at
us
?” said the Lion. “I’m from Gilikin originaly, and my wife is from the Vinkus. Little Daffy is a Munchkinlander, and Mr. Boss—”

“I’m undeclared,” said Mr. Boss.

“We’re a walking galery of the enemies of the Quadlings. And you’d send us down Slaughter Aley? Hardly sociable,” finished Brrr.

“Not so,” said the Quadling. “You have your rafiqi, and Quadlings to give you safe passage.” He bowed just a little to Rain. “She is Quadling, no?” Brrr looked at the girl. He hadn’t thought of her as positioned anywhere in Oz, ethnicaly speaking. But Brrr could see what the mushroom peddler meant. Rain’s face was somewhat heart shaped, a little flatter than those of her companions. Her lips fuler. You couldn’t say that her skin was as ruddy as Heart-of-Mushroom’s, but now, in this light, maybe…

Brrr caught the eye of Mr. Boss. “So the Clock told you to beware of a little girl. Did it. I think the Clock was just jealous. We got ourselves an ambassador.” The itinerant vendor spoke to Rain in Qua’ati. She didn’t notice he was addressing her.

“Not to mind,” he told them. “My people to see what I can see. She is to promise you safe passage on the Road.” He nibbled another portion of his wares and smiled balefuly. “Qhoyre is big city where you can to lose yourself. Such a smal band of soldiers wil not dare to folow you into Qhoyre. You to be safe there.”

“Safe from soldiers,” said Mister Boss. “How about invisible spiders?”

They tried to explain what Rain claimed to have seen. “Maybe the Emperor has trained bloodhound spiders through the magic he denies everyone else?” asked Ilianora.

“Invisible spiders,” said the Lion. “
Did
I mention that even visible spiders cause me angina of the psyche?” They never learned what Heart-of-Mushroom thought about invisible spiders, for at their very mention he paled. In a moment he’d melted away back into the forest, for al practical purposes having gone invisible himself.

“Another one who didn’t come along,” said Rain. “We isn’t too friendified, is we.”

I3.

The Quadling’s terror at spiders that only Rain had seen made the adults more squeamish than ever. Rain, however, experienced a sort of gingery buckling sensation inside. People couldn’t see the spiders and they couldn’t see inside of her—they hadn’t been able to figure out that she’d been teling the truth.

An apprenhension of isolation—that sudden realization of the privacy of one’s most crucial experiences—usualy happens first when a child is much younger than Rain was now. The sensation is often alarming.
Alone as a goose in a gale
, as the saying has it. Rain felt anything but alarmed, though. The invisible world—the world of her instincts—though solitary, was real.

They heard her singing that night, a rhyme of her own devising.

Spidery spiders in the wood

No one knows you very good.

No one can and no one should.

I4.

The deeper they penetrated into Quadling homelands, the more signs they saw of Quadling activity. Rushes laid out on the margins of the Yelow Brick Road to dry in the sun. Donkey dung and human feces. A broken harness for a water buffalo. Meanwhile, no alarums of horse hooves sounded behind them. The Yelow Brick Road south of Gilikin and Munchkinland might be Slaughter Aley, but not for a band of irregulars accompanied by a child with evident Quadling blood.

They made sure to keep Rain front and center, on the Clock’s most prominent seat. No one much believed in the spidery figments, but neither did they believe in taking chances with Quadling poison-tipped arrows.

“I’d like to know what our intention is, when we arrive in Qhoyre,” Ilianora said as they made an evening meal of poached garmot and swamp tomato. They sat right in the middle of the road, their cooking fire banked up upon the brick. “We’re about to have obeyed the advice mimed out of the Grimmerie. We’l have stuck together and gotten south. But what next? And why? We’re going to take a flat there?

Start a plantantion to harvest mildew? Set up a circus? Learn Qua’ati?”

“Tut tut, my little Minxy-Mouth of the Marshgrass.” The dwarf fingered out a fishbone. Marriage had eased his nerves somewhat. “No one knows where home is until it’s too late to escape it. We’l know what to do when we know what to do.”

“Qhoyre can’t be anyone’s home,” argued Ilianora. “Otherwise so many Quadlings wouldn’t have migrated into the northern cities.”

“What is the world
after
Qhoyre?” asked Rain, who seldom listened to their discussions.

Mr. Boss shrugged. “The Road peters out, as I understand it, but Quadling Country squelches on.”

“Oh, even Quadling Country ends, eventualy,” said Little Daffy. “At least according to the lessons in map reading we got in petty nursery. The province meets up with the ring of desert that surrounds al of Oz.”

“But what’s after the desert?” asked Rain.

“More desert,” said the Munchkinlander. “Oz is it, sweetheart.”

“To hear Ozians speak, other places don’t exist,” said Mr. Boss. “There’s no place to the north, like Quox, for instance, except as a supply of fine brandy and the source of a certain plummy accent. Ev, to the south over the sands, doesn’t realy exist—it wouldn’t dare. But oh, we do like our Ev tobacco if a shipment gets through.” Rain scowled. She didn’t understand irony. The dwarf, more respectful of Rain now that she was their de facto rafiqi, took pity and explained. “Oz isn’t surrounded by sands. It’s enislanded in its own self-importance.”

“Hey, Oz is bigger than Ev or Quox or Fliaan,” said Brrr in mock effrontery. “Those dinky sinkholes are hickabily city-states founded by desert tribespeople.”

“Who cares what’s outside of Oz?” agreed the dwarf. “No one goes there. Oz loves itself enough not to care about provincial outposts.”

“But after the deserts?” said Rain.

“Ah, the innocent stupidity of kids,” said the dwarf. “You might as wel ask what is behind the stars, for al we’l ever know. The sands aren’t deadly, that’s just the public relations put out by edge communities. Not that I’m proposing we keep dropping south to become nomads in bed linens. The deserts aren’t hospitable. It’s where dragons come from, for one thing.”

“She wants to know where we’re headed, that’s al,” said Ilianora. “I’m with her on this.”

“Headed to tomorrow. Equaly impossible to tel what’s on the other side of that, but we’l find out when we get there,” said the dwarf. “Everyone, stop your beefing. You’re giving me cramps.” The tomorrows began to blur. In a climate that seemed to know nothing but one season of growth, maturity, decay, al happening simultaneously, perpetualy, even time seemed to lose its coherence. The company grew quieter but their unhappinesses didn’t subside. The cost of wandering without a named destination was proving steep.

Eventualy the Yelow Brick Road petered out—brick by brick, almost—but the tramped track remained wide enough to accommodate the Clock of the Time Dragon. The signs of human enterprise grew more numerous. The companions began to spot Quadlings in trees, in flatboats, even on the mud-rutted road. The natives gave the company of the Clock a wide berth but a respectful one. Brrr observed that Quadlings, the butt of ethnic smears al over Oz, seemed in their own homeland to be more capable of courtesy to strangers than Munchkinlanders or Gilikinese.

Ilianora put her veil back upon her brow despite the steamy everlastingness of jungle summer.

There was no good way to avoid Qhoyre. The provincial capital had colonized al the dry land making up the isthmus-among-the-reeds upon which it squatted. And
squatted
was the word. Brrr, who had lived in the Emerald City and in Shiz, knew capital cities to be places of pomp and self-approval. Qhoyre looked mostly like a colection of hangars for the drying of rice. Indeed, Brrr reasoned, that was probably how the city began.

At ground level, the stuccoed administration buildings showcased an extravagance of softstone carvings both profane and devotional. Above them, ornament was abandoned for louvers, weathered out of plumb, and perforated screens of raffia or stone. Shabby, genteel. The hulks of Rice House and Ruby House and the Bureau of Tariffs and Marsh Law—titles carved not in Qua’ati but in Ozish even Rain could now read—loomed beside soapbone shops that wobbled on stilts above household pork-pen and pissery. But government house and grocery alike featured spavinned roofbeams. To swale away monsoon-burst, Brrr later figured out. Sensible in that climate, though the first impression was of a dignified old city in its dotage.

The Quadlings swarmed about the companions without evident panic. “They never heard of the Clock,” said Mr. Boss under his breath. “How bizarre. They don’t
want
a glimpse of the future from us. We could retire here, no?”

“No,” said Ilianora, spooked by the crowds.

To Brrr’s eye the Quadlings seemed louche and convivial. They’d survived al attempts by unionist ministers to convert them, preferring their own obscure daliance with fetishes, radishes, and the odd augury by kittle-stones. Stals on the edge of market squares might be shrines or chapels, or then again they might be the tipping place for one’s household refuse. Little Daffy, with her Munchkinlander’s lust for a good scrub, was appaled. “It’s not even the nakedness behind those loincloths,” she said. “It’s that you can see they haven’t even washed wel back there.” With aggressive cleanliness she took to pumicing her own face on the hour.

When the company paused for the night in a blameless nook, natives emerged from aleys and mews-ways to bring rattan trays of steaming red rice and fresh fruit and stinking vegetables. They set their offerings before Rain as if she were their local girl made good, and skittered away. “Monkey people,” said Little Daffy.

Rain showed no particular interest in this population to whom, Brrr conceded, she did bear some resemblance. She tried to make friends with the myriad hairless white dogs who cowered everywhere, under open staircases of cedar and rope. Rain put out rice and then fruit, and they would venture forth to sniff at the offering, but scurry back. She tried with some of the brown vegetables, the ones like voluted woody asparagus, and they also turned up their snouts at that. Then she arranged some of the asparagus into a few words—FOR YOU. EAT. So they did.

“How does she do that?” asked the dwarf of Brrr. “Have you any idea?”

“I’m the muscle in this outfit, you’re the brains,” replied the Lion. “As long as they don’t come and eat us, I don’t care how she does it.
Are
they dogs?”

“Or rats. Or weasels.”

The torpor of the climate induced a lethargy that the companions didn’t mind indulging; they’d been moving about for some time now. Easier to have your meals delivered than to press on with no assurance of decent foraging ahead. “We’l know when it’s time to go,” said Mr. Boss, from the hammock he had strung between the post of a bat house and a nearby wrinkleroot tree. “Climb up here and get cozy with me, wife.”

“It’s the middle of the afternoon and that’s a see-through hammock,” protested Little Daffy.

“They don’t mind.” And it was true; the Quadlings acted on their impulses when so inclined, without shame or secrecy. Interestingly, Rain seemed not to notice, either. The innocence of that child, thought Brrr, was troubling when it wasn’t refreshing.

The dwarf and Little Daffy didn’t budge from the vicinity where they’d stodged the Clock. “We have to guard the book,” they reminded Ilianora languidly. “You’re feeling antsy about our prospects, you go find someone to talk to.”

Brrr’s wife held out as long as she could, but finaly she wrapped her shawl so tightly around herself that only her eyes showed, and she began to explore the town on her own. She was looking for someone who could translate Qua’ati for them. She found an old woman in a tobacco shop whose feet had been chewed off by an aligator but who could hobble about on sticks. Ilianora persuaded her to come back to the Clock. The nearly deaf old woman agreed to answer what of their questions she could in exchange for a salve that Little Daffy swore would regenerate her feet—but not for a year, which would give them plenty of time to get far away from her. “Anyway, she’s not going to run after us protesting, is she,” murmured Little Daffy to the others, sotto voce.

Her name, as near as they could make it out, was Chalotin. A bitter orange rind of a woman passing herself off as a seer. Brrr, who not long ago had spent some intense hours with old Yackle, could tel the difference between chalk and chocolate. Chalotin was rather thin chalk.

Stil, for an old broad she pivoted about on impressively flexible haunches. She ran pinkish fingertips over her perfect ancient teeth as she told them what she knew.

Yes, she said, though the Emperor’s forces got no love no more, no more, they stil made a preemptory show of authority every now and then. The only way they ever arrived was the High Parade, the route the company of the Clock had taken—what was left of the Yelow Brick Road. Quadlings let them pass as long as they marched in dress uniform rather than field garb. They never came in the rainy season, though. Or never yet.

“So they
could
tromp in any day,” confirmed Brrr in a soft roar, that she could hear him.

Yes, her shrugging expression implied. Wouldn’t put it past ’em.

“Where do they set up?”

“One of the government houses.” Warming to her subject, she told them that the EC had once kept a firmer grip on Quadling Country, dating al the way back to the days of the Wizard, when the extension of the Yelow Brick Road first alowed swamp engineers to come in and cul the mud flats of their rubies.