Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (30 page)

“Nor from your wife,” replied Brrr, “tricking that old seer in Qhoyre into thinking her feet would grow back.”

“You’re hardly one to talk about conscience,” began the Munchkinlander.

“Stop,” said Ilianora in a low, deadened sort of voice. They did, but only because she hadn’t spoken for a while. “Prophecy is dead, and conscience is dead too.” They kept walking, making whiskery sounds of passage in the verdure.

She continued, dry as a sphinx in the Sour Sands. “That berdache believed that any Unnamed God must be a dead god. But it’s conscience that’s dead. Maybe the dragon realy w-was … was the conscience of Oz. But it’s dead. Oz is broken in parts—Loyal Oz divided from Munchkinland, and who knows what polders and provinces might splinter off next? There isn’t any ful Oz anymore, and no conscience, either. That’s why the dragon died. Just about the time those other real dragons threatened to attack Munchkinland. We’re broke. We’re broke and we can’t be fixed.”

“Nonsense,” said Brrr, trying to hurry a little to her side, but he was so tired, and the heavy cart of dead conscience dragged at him.

“And what’s left then?” The Lion’s wife tried to stifle a gasp of remorse. “We’re al schemers and liars, thieves and scoundrels. To our own private good cause. There’s no primary conscience to cal us up.” It was Little Daffy who replied—she who had toed the line of unionism the most faithfuly al those years in the mauntery.

“If there’s no good conscience to trust,” she declared, “no Lurline, no Ozma, no Unnamed God, no standard of goodness, then we have to manage for ourselves. Maybe there’s no central girl in some hal in the Emerald City, al bronzed and verdigrised, al windswept hair and upthrust naked breast, lots of bright honor carved in her blind and focused eyes. No conscience like that, no reliable regula of goodness. So it’s up to us, each of us a part. A patchwork conscience. If we al make our own mistakes, from Rain stealing stuff to the rest of us lying to ourselves and each other—wel, we can al make amends, too. No one of us the final arbiter, but each of us capable of adding our little bit. We’re the patchwork conscience of Oz, us lot. As long as the Unnamed God refuses to take off the mask and come for a visit. As long as the dragon has croaked on us.”

No one seconded the notion. No one objected. They staggered on. Wilting, aggrieved, conscience-stricken, duled.

I9.

They read the solar compass, the play of shadows on staggered sets of slope. It shouldn’t take more than fifteen or twenty hours to cross the Sleeve of Ghastile, they guessed. Stil, every day they could manage no more than a few miles before exhaustion set in. Brrr was aware that sunlight was good for the eradication of mange, but he needed to rest under the cart. In the shadows. Outside, in the bright light, the red of poppies burned against his retinas through his closed eyelids. A siege of coral light, a siege of fire.

Even Little Daffy, with her familiarity with amelioratives and strikems, purges and preventicks, seemed dazed with the effect. “Consolidated airborne precipitate. How
do
these blossoms manage?” she moaned, and roled down on the ground next to her husband, exposing her bosom to the glow. The liberty of Quadling mores had rooted in her in a big way.

Ilianora, however, became ever more shrouded in her veils. Only her eyes showed.

The Sleeve was ahead of them and behind them, a river of mocking ful-lipped smiles lapping a third of the way up the foothils on either side of them. Had anyone been able to look overhead, they would have thought the sky was red, too, probably; red, or by that trick of compensation that human eyes manage briefly, perhaps green.

The companions had decided to try traveling under the red stars at night, when the effect of the vegetation was less oppressive. During the day they napped or lay down with handkerchiefs over their eyes, stoned. Ilianora, perhaps because she kept her veils over her nose and mouth, became the de facto lookout, and even she found her attention hard to marshal. “You should take some water,” she would murmur, to no one in particular, and then get some for herself when no one replied. On one such occasion she rounded the corner of the Clock and walked into a loosened shutter.

The main doors of the Clock had swung open. Rain was lying on the stage, a hand draped over the edge as if she were dabbling her fingers in a brook.

Then Rain sat up, and her eyes were wide and staring, but not at Ilianora. The child’s expression was equal parts horror and fascination. Rain seemed in a spel of delusion, beginning to reach out to invisible creatures on the ground, to pet something, to lift them up, then to recoil her fingertips as if they’d been bitten or burned.

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 holow, 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 fal from the stage, though, or suffer a mental colapse 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 sily, 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. Eventualy Rain began to soften, her paralysis to colapse, and she fel 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 fel, Ilianora was huddled against Brrr as he puled himself up to a crouch. Little Daffy made some gloppy soup with a garnish of poppy polen 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. Stil, the fact they could stil 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 folowing 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 umbrela ribs, but more straight. Like what Murthy used to cal 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 al that. A case of nerves about being unpracticed at both sex and society was nothing compared to fretting that the wal 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 al 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 cal ’em to me, but they came. They been folowing for a while I guess but I forgot to tel you.”

“Cal 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 puling 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 fel 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 stil here?” As baritone a voice as he could manage.

“They is al 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 al 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. Al except for the one Rain had caled 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?

Wel, she was sealed up, for one thing—actualy and symbolicaly. That must be it. But having been protected by the suture, she was stil vulnerable. The variety of despair brought on by panic and dread.

She’d seen too much torture in her childhood. How wel 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 wel-behaved manner, so the companions pressed on through the Sleeve of Ghastile al night. They were eager to escape whatever the lure of poppies caled 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 valey of the poppies.

Little Daffy regretted leaving such abundance of raw poppy material behind, but she went along grudgingly, making alowances for future needs.

Mr. Boss wanted his Clock to start working again.

Hugging Tay like a rag dol, Rain fel 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 tel, but things were improving. Maybe they were al just drying out after the wet year. Eventualy 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 carefuly 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 knol. Little Daffy was snipping some wild runner beans into a salad. Suddenly Tay set up a careering lolop as if bit by a stag-head beetle. The rice otter went plunging over the edge of the rise. Ilianora folowed it with her eyes—more spiders?—to see Rain walking through grass forty, fifty feet down the steepening slope, toward a fel 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 fel 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 sandhil 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, al 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 stil. 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 hil toward the Clock, which lay on its side, the dragon snout colapsed into its own poppy cushions, laid to rest.

“Get back, Rain,” growled Brrr. “Go to Ilianora. She’s having a fit up there.”