Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (40 page)

One afternoon Iskinaary reported that they were nearing the edge of a great lake. At first the companions imagined they might have veered back toward the east. But Iskinaary said he could see no sign of habitation, no coracles or vilages. Just barren cliffs around flat black water bereft of whitecaps. Devoid even of avian populations. “Kelswater, then,” said the dwarf. “Uck. I’ve seen it once or twice before. It gives me the creeps.”

“Why?” asked Rain, whose experience of lakes had only involved Restwater.

“It’s a dead lake, dead as doormats. Nothing swims in it. Neither fish nor frog. Nothing living floats upon it, not a water skeetle or a lily pad.”

“We should make a swift detour,” said Nor. “That time the Munchkinlander rebels forced the EC Messiars back into Kelswater, the soldiers didn’t so much drown as—as melt. Kelswater possesses some of the properties of acid. Cold acid. It puled their skin from their bones even as they thrashed, we were told.”

“Wel, that puts the tin hat on our hopes to practice our synchronized swimming,” said Brrr. “Oh wel. No matter what they say about me in the columns, I never fancied prancing about the beach in a singlet and a cache-sex.”

“How could a lake be dead?” asked Rain. “Or how could it be alive, either?”

Little Daffy said, “Someone in the tribe of the Scrow told me that legend suggests Kumbricia the demon-goddess lives there. Or died there. Or something. Maybe she only has a summer home. I don’t remember.”

“Who is Kumbricia?”

“Stop,” said Candle. “Children don’t need to know stories like that.”

“Yes, they do,” said the Goose. “Kumbricia, little gosling, is the opposite number to Lurline, in the oldest tales of Oz. She is the hex, she is the curse, she’s always implicated when things go wrong…”

“She’s there when the shoelace snaps as you’re trying to outrun the horsemen of the plains,” said Nor.

“She’s what breathes the pox on the wheezy child for whom the poultice, oddly, won’t work,” said Little Daffy.

“She is the itch where you can’t quite reach,” said Mr. Boss.

“
Stop
,” said Candle. “I mean it.”

“Not before my turn,” said the Lion. “Kumbricia is the way the whole world arches its eyebrow at you before it smacks you down. Where
is
she, you ask? Not in the lake. Not in the pox. Not in the shoelace or the horse hooves. She’s in the interference of effects, nothing more than that. In the crossroads of possibility, giggling through her nose at us.”

“You’l slice open the child with that nonsense!” Candle yeled at them. They almost laughed to hear her raise her high ribbony voice, but the expression on her face stopped them.

Apologeticaly, even though he hadn’t joined in, Lir said, “But then, on the other hand, there’s Lurlina. The soul of … of grace … grace, and—” Mr. Boss wasn’t daunted by Candle. “No one believes in Lurline. A goddess of goodness? Forget it. She’s been taking a cigarette break since the year dot. She’s as gone as the Unnamed God. Pretty enough in the stories, to be sure, but once she finished breathing green into every corner of Oz, she vanished. No return in the second act, I’m afraid.”

“I hate you al,” said Candle. She grabbed Rain’s hand and Rain tried to pul away, but this time Candle wouldn’t let her.

“What you hate is the world,” said Mr. Boss placidly. “We’re just as blameless in talking about it as the pox is blameless, or the shoelace. What you hate is that your child is stuck here. Wel, get used to it.

The only exit is the final one.”

“To the bosom of Lurline,” muttered Little Daffy.

“And a scratchy bosom it is, I bet,” said the dwarf.

Lir opened his mouth again but found he couldn’t say anything more. There was no apology for the way the world worked. Only accommodation to it, while at the same time committing—somehow—not to give up. Not to give up on Rain, and her chances—whatever they might be. In fact, not to give up on anyone.

“I want to see the dead lake,” said Rain.

“Can’t hurt you if you don’t go near it,” said the dwarf.

But they’d been walking as they talked, and suddenly Kelswater opened up before them. The greyness of it under a fine blue sky seemed to deaden the entire district. The forest wouldn’t grow within a hundred yards of it. The margins of sand and tumbles of rock were desolate. No yelow pipers, no reeds, no bouncing sand-sprites. No breeze, no reflections. A scent of salt and iron, perhaps.

“I know a lot of families that would pay good cash to send their kids to a summer camp pitched on this shore,” murmured Mr. Boss.

“Enough, you,” said Little Daffy. “Do stop. It’s too hideous. Somehow.”

Iskinaary took wing again and circled about. They waited safely back on a limestone promontory some twenty feet above the lake. The Goose rose, banked, rose again. When he returned, he seemed shaken. “One senses almost a magnetic pul,” he told them. “On a sunny day I usualy can ride the updrafts over a body of water, but this water works to the contrary. Let’s not linger here.”

“Which way looks safest?” asked Lir.

“Northeast,” replied Iskinaary. “Keeping the lake on our left. We’l come upon the oakhair forest that spans the divide between Kelswater and Restwater. That’s as far as we go together. If the forest isn’t filed with border patrols, those heading for a rescue mission might slip eastward here and find themselves back in Munchkinland, back near the banks of Restwater. With another big push. Shal we?” They should, yes. They would. As they turned about to leave Kelswater behind, however, a couple of stray warthogs who must have been folowing them these past few days came charging up the slope from the underbrush.

The warthogs of Kumbricia: innocently troublesome, like al aspects of the world.

They darted beneath the cart and between the legs of the Lion, spooking him badly but spooking Tay worse. They caught the otter for a moment, pinned him to the ground on the edge of the bluff, and played with him prettily as they readied to gore him. Brrr twisted in his shafts. The others screamed and waved their arms. Rain dashed forward, between the grunting terrors, and thwacked one of them over the forehead with her shel. It didn’t break, but blood gushed forth from an eye socket of that creature.

The rice otter broke free and dove for Rain’s leg, snaking up her thigh onto her shoulders. The second hog charged Rain. The Lion was nearest and the first to arrive in defense. Shooting his claws, he raked half the pelt off the warthog, which grunted in fury and surprise. Rain fel back into the arms of Candle and Lir. As the Lion twisted about to check for the first warthog, in case it was readying for another feint, the Clock on the wagon overbalanced. The replacement axle, carved from the salowwood dragon wing, buckled at last. A wheel caved inward. The snout of the dragon reared up at the sky as if trying, one final time, to escape its tethered post upon this theater of doom. Its broken wings flapped, but there was no wind to catch, not in this open air tomb-land. Slowly, and then faster the Clock hurtled down the slope toward Kelswater. Wheels and shaft, temple of fate adorned with a clock face at midnight and dragon up top—and the Lion stil laced to it.

The dwarf managed a partial rescue. Dragged down the bluff, stil he managed to pul his dirk from some inner pouch and slash the leather harness. On sands that shifted, conspiring with gravity to drag them to their wet grave, Brrr scrabbled for a purchase. The Lion escaped, the dwarf leapt clear, but the Clock careered off the bluff. Brrr turned in time to watch the wheels, the carriage, the theater, and finaly the Time Dragon disappear into oily deeps. The last thing they saw was its red red eye, until black liquid blinked out whatever final vision it might have enjoyed.

“Ladyfish got ’m at last,” murmured Rain.

And when the Lion had caught his breath—some hours later—he thought: maybe that’s why the Clock told the dwarf to avoid taking on a girl child as an associate. It could see in that decision the chance of its own destruction. When we disobeyed it—it shut down. It wouldn’t accept the Grimmerie anymore. For the Clock, then, it was only a matter of time.

II.

That was the end of the company of the Clock of the Time Dragon. Four days later they prepared for a parting of ways.

The dwarf expressed no preferences. Cross-country to Munchkinland or north, deeper into Loyal Oz—it made no difference now. The Clock was extinct and the Grimmerie deeded to Lir. “Come to Munchkinland,” suggested the Lion. “Without the Clock to slow us down or the book to guard, what harm might come to us? If we need to outrun a border patrol, I can easily carry you and Little Daffy on my back.” He held back from saying, “Your stint as a kindergarten supervisor is over.” He owed his life to the dwarf.

In any event, Munchkinland would be safer for the Lion, who in Loyal Oz might stil be considered AWOL from his mission to locate the Grimmerie. Brrr intended to light out to Bright Lettins or to Colwen Grounds or wherever the trial of Dorothy would be staged. He had always thought Dorothy a bit of a blockhead, but not a malicious one. Maybe he could help her. It would be good to help someone. He was beginning to accept that he couldn’t do as much for his own wife as he’d have liked. He couldn’t remove from her history, by force of either comfort or magic, the fact that she’d spent some of her girlhood in prison. He couldn’t repair her. But he could, just possibly, do for Dorothy what he couldn’t do for Nor.

Whom he now would leave behind. But not, they both promised each other, for good.

Little Daffy, for her part, was eager to return to her home after al these years. She’d emigrated as a child, entering the mauntery after a stint at a home for incurables in the Emerald City, but she was returning a married woman in this time of trial. She was ready to stand at the ramparts of her homeland and spit in the eye of any gangly Emerald City Messiar who might deserve it. As long as she had a ladder to stand upon, for the height.

She kept her husband close to her side. What would he do, who would he turn out to be, now that the Grimmerie was traded to Lir, and the Clock of the Time Dragon was history? Maybe he’d find her Munchkin cousins affable, and he’d adjust to domestic life. Maybe when the troubles were over, they’d settle in her childhood home of Center Munch or even in Far Applerue, nearer the Glikkus. Perhaps Mr.

Boss would find he had an affinity with the trol-people of the Glikkus, who didn’t farm but mined emeralds for their livelihood. Little Daffy didn’t know. The Clock wasn’t there to advise them. They would have to make it up as they went along.

She was glad, however, she’d colected in a few private pockets a little bit of the poppy dust from the great red flourish in the Sleeve of Ghastile. She was finding that, used in moderation, it came in handy at moving her poor aggrieved husband ahead.

The companions made their good-byes in a grove of oakhair trees. Long strands of new growth, acorns forming at the tips, dropped a kind of silent rain among them. An outdoor room laced with harp strings. As the companions stood there, reluctant to take their leave of one another, a breeze scurried along the floor of the forest. It strummed the strings of the oakhair fronds, a soft and jangled music, an orchestral evocation of the mood that had settled upon them.

“You’l be better off the farther away from the fighting you get,” the Lion told Lir. “But, taking a leaf from Sister Doctor, don’t tel me where you’re going. It’l be safer for you if we don’t know.”

“I don’t know myself,” said Lir. “I have an idea or two, but time wil have to tel. We wish we could come with you to the defense of Dorothy. But it’s too dangerous.”

“No joke,” replied the Lion. “If you show yourself in Bright Lettins, the Munchkinlanders might impress you to take the Eminenceship of Munchkinland whether you want to do it or not. You’d give Munchkinland an edge. Your investiture would render void the claim that the Emperor Shel is making upon Munchkinland. It wouldn’t be safe for you, and certainly not safe for Rain.”

“We aren’t done keeping her hidden,” agreed Lir.

“We’l never be done with that,” added Candle. “I think that wil be our curse.”

Nor knelt down before the Lion and spoke as if to her knees, not her husband. “I don’t want you to go, but it’s for the best. You do the work at the trial that I would do if I could. The public statement is beyond me, in any venue. And I may be useful yet in helping take care of Rain. If Lir and Candle are ever recognized, if they’re accosted in any way, I’l be able to stand in for Rain. She is my niece, after al.”

“I know,” said Brrr. “She is closer to you than I am.”

“That’s not what I mean,” said Nor, “and furthermore it isn’t true. No one is closer to me than you are. But she’s in greater peril. She wil be grown one day. She may be safe sooner than we think. We’l meet up again.”

Lir took his sister’s hand as he disagreed with her. “Dear friends. While the country is at war, no living citizen is safe. If we choose to find one another again—and we may never have that choice—let’s agree to use the Chancel of the Ladyfish as a mail drop. We can leave notes for one another on paper weighed down by Rain’s favorite stone—that one with the tiny carving of the question mark sporting the head of a horse. Agreed?”

They al nodded. In this treacherous land, the chapel seemed as safe a rendezvous point as any other.

“It’s time to go,” said Lir.

“Check anytime a Goose flies overhead,” said Iskinaary to the Lion. “If I lose my bowels in your direction, it’s not personal.” He ducked his head under a wing, pretending to work at a nit, to save face in the face of strong feeling.

Rain wouldn’t come forward to say good-bye to Little Daffy or to Mr. Boss. And she wouldn’t look at Brrr. But she seemed to understand that there was a need to move on, even if she didn’t understand why. She put her grandmother’s broom on the ground. She set her shel on the ground next to it. She walked forward to the Cowardly Lion. She didn’t stretch her arms for a hug—how does a girl hug a Lion?

Her arms lay straight at her side, as if she were a member of a military guard on duty. She sloped forward and she fel woodenly against the Lion’s cheek and mane and brow. She didn’t cry, but leaned upright against his face as he cried for both of them.