Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (41 page)

The Judgment of Dorothy

I.

By night the Lion and his pair of comrades crossed into Munchkinland without incident. They’d skirted to the north, avoiding Haugaard’s Keep and those aggrieved lake vilages. Restwater and the Pine Barrens were behind them. It felt pretty damn good to be pacing a wel-maintained stretch of the Yelow Brick Road. The Free State of Munchkinland might be nearing insolvency, but trust little farming people to keep their blue roofing tiles scrubbed clean of birdshit and their tomatoes staked as if they were prize philanthriums.

“The Munchkinlanders,” said Little Daffy, “cal this season of the year Seedtime.”

“I can see why,” said Brrr. It seemed to belie the anxiety of wartime, to spit in its face, this bounty of Munchkinland. Mile after mile of pasture riled with green fringe. Paddocks dizzy with birdsong and cloudy with bugs. Meadows patroled by farmers, by the occasional tiktok contrivance on its wheels and puleys and traction belts. “A Gilikin abomination in Munchkinlander fields is my partisan sentiment,” said Little Daffy.

“Machinery in exchange for grain. It’s caled free trade,” said Brrr.

“Cal me old-fashioned, but I prefer the traditional scarecrow. Any chance we’re going to run into your friend? Might he be heading to rescue Dorothy too?”

“Doubtful. He had the brains to make a clean break of the matter. Me, I’m too much of a coward.”

“Mmm,” said Mr. Boss, which was as opinionated as he got these days.

“No wonder this part of Munchkinland is known as the Corn Basket,” said the Lion. He had only ever seen the scrappier bits, the hardscrabble places that Animals had retreated to a generation or two ago, when Loyal Oz kicked them out of the law and commerce and the tonier echelons of the banks and coleges. Now he saw Animals in the fields, more than he’d expected. True, they were labor rather than management. But it was stil work. “Do they comb off anything in the way of sharing the profits?”

“I couldn’t possibly say,” puffed Little Daffy. “I left Munchkinland years ago, before the infusion of new labor. Why? Are you looking for a farmhand position after we scope out this business about the trial of Dorothy?”

Wel, he wasn’t. He’d done his share of farmwork on pocket handkerchief farms to the south. Barely subsistence enterprises. He’d hauled manure and brought in spattery little crops. He’d been paid in last winter’s carrots and he’d been loaned a flea-infused blanket to sleep under. No one had talked to him for seven years, and that had been fine with him. But had central Munchkinland always been so prosperous?

He hadn’t noticed. Too distracted by self-loathing.

With every mile Little Daffy grew more cocky. She’d been born, she told them, up near the terminus of the Yelow Brick Road—Center Munch. From a family of farmers, of course. One of four or five siblings whose names she couldn’t now recal. She’d only traveled the Yelow Brick Road once before, when she was a teenager starting as a student nurse in Bright Lettins. “It was hardly more than a hamlet back then,” she said, “at the head of a tributary of the Munchkin River. I can’t wait to see it gussied up as a capital city.”

“It won’t look like the EC, anyway,” said the Lion. “This place is so different from Loyal Oz. I wonder that Munchkinlanders were ever wiling to be ruled by the Emerald City.” Little Daffy replied, “Nessarose Thropp rose to prominence by exploiting a provincial identity that Munchkinlanders had always felt, but suppressed. We never trusted Loyal Ozians even before the secession. We’re not like you.”

“Wel, I’m an Animal,” said Brrr, “but I take your point.”

“I’m not like me anymore, either,” said the dwarf.

“And it’s not just the height thing,” said Little Daffy. “Lots of Munchkinlanders are tal as other Ozians.”

“Lots of us are taler inside our trousers than outside,” said her husband.

“Shut up, you,” said Little Daffy, but lovingly. At least he was verbal.

A few days later they approached the new capital over a series of low bridges spanning irrigation canals. Something of the feel of a holiday park for families, thought Brrr. Bright Lettins wasn’t gleaming and garish, like the Emerald City, nor ancient and stuffed with character, like Shiz, the capital of Gilikin. But it ornamented the landscape with its own brand of Munchkin confidence. From this approach, the effect at a distance was of a huddle of children’s building blocks: roofs of scaloped tile, blue or plum. Entering the city, the travelers found buildings made of stone-covered stucco painted in shades of grey and sand.

Many structures were joined by arches over the street, creating a series of outdoor chambers, squares funneling into alées debouching into piazzas. Pleasing, welcoming.

And clean? Gutters ran under iron grils next to the coping in the streets, carrying away ordure of every variety. Windows clearer than mountain ice. The buildings ran to three and a half stories, by diktat apparently, though since they were Munchkin stories they weren’t very high.

“Where do taler people and Animals stay?” asked Brrr.

“Not here,” was the answer they got from chatelaine and inn master alike. After a while someone directed them to an Animal hostelry in a shabbier neighborhood. Reportedly the only place where Animals and humans could find rooms under the same roof, with a sign outside that read A STABLE HOME. The entrance for taler people and Animals was supplied at a side door marked OTHERS. “Wel, I’ve been waiting almost four decades to decide who and what I am, and I’ve finaly stumbled upon the answer,” said Brrr. “I’m an Other. But how are we going to pay?” Little Daffy dug from some hidey-purse under her aprons a clutch of folded notes. “Whoa, have you been peddling poppy dust behind our backs?” asked Brrr when he caught sight of the wad.

“Before I left the mauntery several years ago, I dashed to its treasury,” she said. “I guessed that Sister Petty Cash abandoned her stash as she and the others were fleeing for their lives. I’ve never had the need to spend it yet.”

“Isn’t that theft?”

“I consider it back wages for thirty years of sacrifice.”

“I’m not complaining.”

The innkeeper was a dejected widow falen on hard times. Taking in lodgers out of need. She resented them from the start. But rent was rent. “Your old felow needs a rest,” she said to Little Daffy as she glanced over at where Mr. Boss was propped against a wal. “
He’s
not from around here. Sick, is he?”

“He’s a dwarf. He comes like that,” said Little Daffy. “It’s been a long trip. We’l be grateful to take our key and find our room.”

“You two are just up the stairs. Next to my room, so I can keep an eye on you should you get up to anything.”

“What’s your name so I can cal it out during wild sex?” asked Mr. Boss. Grumpiness made him come to life.

“You won’t need my name. I’m in business only until the troubles are over. I don’t leave the establishment untended. Now I’l thank you to avoid monkey business while in this hostel.”

“I’l cal you Dame Hostile,” said Mr. Boss, grinning to show his tobacco-stained smile.

“I’l be happy to help you sweep up. I can remove splinters, bake a little,” said Little Daffy hastily. “We’l be ideal guests, believe me.”

“You,” said the chatelaine to the Lion, “your room is out back. Down the aley. Don’t brush your mane in the public rooms, I have alergies.” Ah, little has changed for the Animals, thought Brrr. His room, though separate and sparely fitted, was clean enough.

The next day, market day in Bright Lettins. The central district was packed dense with stals and shoppers. Plenty indeed—mounds of baby squash, punnets of spring berries like pucklegem and queen’s beads.

Lettuces so new and tender you could hold the leaves up to the light and see through them. Despite the abundance, however, the haggling was fierce. Voices raised on both sides, vendor and housewife. “No spare coin to be had in
this
crowd,” murmured Little Daffy. One furious merchant upended a cart of his own pricey white asparagus tips and let his pig eat them rather than sel them for the pittance that had been proferred. The pig sported the only satisfied smirk Brrr saw al morning.

The newcomers settled for elevenses at a café, hoping to overhear something useful. Farmers muttered over the weather, the prices, the progress of the war. Words were said about General Jinjuria, the peasant warrior, and about Mombey, the head of the government. Little Daffy ordered tea and beer and river prawns in tarragon. They ate in silence, listening for al they were worth.

“They’l never starve us out,” said one old bearded felow with a prosthetic ear made of tin. “They can siphon al the water they want from our precious Restwater, but as long as our farms are upstream of the lake, we’l not go short of water and so we won’t go short of food.”

“We should dam the Munchkin River and dry out the lake,” said the waitress, settling down with her own beer.

“We couldn’t drain that lake any way shy of a miracle. It’s fed by runoff of the Great Kels,” someone argued. “That’s part of the rationale for the EC requisitioning the water in the first place.”

“How is this Jinjuria holding the EC forces at Haugaard’s Keep?” asked Brrr. The Munchkinlander locals glanced at one another. Maybe, thought Brrr, Animals don’t talk across café tables to humans they didn’t know socialy.

“The Lion asked you a question,” said Little Daffy. “Nicely.”

The old man looked suspicious of their ignorance. He stroked his taffycolored beard, combing it with his fingers. “Jinjuria, she could have held on to Haugaard’s Keep, you know that. It’s almost impregnable. Slitted windows high up, and a pair of moated entrances. With their superior numbers the EC Messiars swarmed up the lakeside of the keep, see, and General Jinjuria’s forces put on a handsome show of repeling them—but only as a lure. Soon as the assailants had gained the ramparts on ladders and arrow-slung ropes, Jinjuria set in motion the quick retreat she’d planned. The bulk of our forces that had held Haugaard’s Keep retreated on the land side, burning the wooden decking on the moat entrance as they went. Not everyone made it out, of course, and the heads of our patriot martyrs were bowled down into the moat for several weeks afterward and bobbed there like muskmelons. But Jinjuria’s strategy worked. She boxed up the Emerald City high command, General Cherrystone as they cal him, and the cream of his forces too. She can’t starve him out, as she can’t prevent supplies from arriving on the lakeside, by flotilas of this sort or that. But she can prevent him from leaving by land. And if he left by lake—wel, that would be a retreat, pure and simple. No, she’s got him cornered, like a cat playing with a larder mouse.”

“Briliant.” Little Daffy’s eyes glowed with pride.

“It’s a stalemate, no pretending otherwise,” said the garrulous one among the locals. “Where have you lot been, that this is al news to you?”

“Doing missionary work,” said Little Daffy quickly, before Brrr could falter or fudge. “Is Mombey here?”

“Said to be in residence at Colwen Grounds.”

“And Dorothy?” asked Brrr. “Is she expected soon?”

They didn’t know what Brrr was talking about. “Dorothy?
Her?
We won’t see the likes of Dorothy again. Not in this lifetime.”