Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (62 page)

Gilikin west of Shiz.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

She didn’t answer, but when they came to a crossroads where a stone gave several choices—a boon, this moonlit night!—the fifth of five choices said simply
THE WEST
. That road looked the most desperate, and she struck out along that one, though the striking was slowing down some, and eventualy they stopped to sleep a little. They burrowed under a hedgerow, mightily irritating some birds and some sort of family reunion of mice. Was it only a dream that they were talking to her? “If you’re headed for the Kels, you’ve chosen wel enough. But once you reach the Gilikin River folow it to your left until the mountains come in sight. You wil have crossed into the Vinkus by then, and be near enough to ask directions to Kiamo Ko.”

She woke before Tip did. His hand was on her breast, and he slept with his mouth open. Tay dozed greenly between them, closer to both than they could dare be to each other. She hadn’t heard Tip breathing in his sleep for what seemed like such a long time. She began to cry for no reason she could name. Tay stirred and licked Rain’s tears off her face with its sandpaper tongue.

Once there had been a mouseskin in a field. It had been on her finger. She had wanted to be a mouse. She had wanted to be something other than what she was. She had had so many chances, and she had passed so many of them by.

I must have become what Madame Chortlebush cals a teenmonster, crying for nothing, and feeling my life is over. She warned us about this, thought Rain.

“Wake up, it’s not morning but it’s light enough to walk,” she said to Tip, but she didn’t move, for she didn’t want his hand to slip away an instant sooner than it needed to.

He woke and shuddered and seemed not to notice he had been touching her. He shuffled to the other side of the hedge and let loose a long confident stream of pee, standing up. She turned her head away and softly smiled to herself, and couldn’t say why.

The road grew rougher, less traveled; and while there were farmers about, with carts and animals, no one paid the young walkers much mind. Wel, Rain hardly looked like a St. Prowd’s girl, having slept in her best dress, which was never very good to start with. And Tip had left behind the penitential uniform that Miss Ironish had insisted he wear. They looked like brother and sister traipsing along, since they were too young stil to be—to be anything else.

She tried to make smal talk, as they caled it, but it was too smal for Tip, and she soon gave up. Tay capered after them almost as a dog might, and sometimes alowed itself to be carried on the shoulders of one or the other. They bought the cheapest food at any crossroad farmstand they passed, always taking care to folow signs for
THE WEST
, which by late in the day had begun to be caled
GILLIKIN R
. With an attempt at good humor Tip referenced the map once or twice, but its markings were archaic, and Rain was happier when he put it away.

“Why aren’t you heading toward your own home?” Rain asked once.

“Why aren’t you minding your own business?” he replied.

So they walked, and ate, and sang a little bit—that was neutral enough—and slept again. Longer this time, for they had spent a whole day on shank’s mare. The next day Rain had blisters and the friends had to slow down. The day after that Tip had grown his own blisters, worse than hers, and they paused on the banks of a river they had found. They didn’t know if it was the Gilikin already or a tributary, but if they turned left at the water’s edge and kept walking west, they would either see the great mountains sooner or later on the horizon, or they would see their river merge with a larger one. That is, assuming the mice in the hedgerow were correct. But how could mice know where Rain wanted to go?

A series of bluffs and strands ran down to the water’s edge, which was frantic with fish life and seemed some sort of bird paradise as wel. Tay dove away from them for the water, and for a moment Rain thought she might have lost her rice otter forever, but after a half hour’s frolic Tay returned, its hair slicked back and some sort of weed in its teeth, a very happy look on its face.

Rain and Tip found a kind of cave with a little ledge in front of it, almost a front porch with a river view. A single room, not too deep, nothing scary asleep inside but for a few bats in the ceiling. What could be better? Tay brought them some fish, and Tip, who’d come equipped with a flintstone, struck up a smal fire. Whatever fish it was, he baked it wrapped in whatever greens. It was the best meal Rain had ever eaten.

She didn’t remember faling asleep, but she was suddenly sitting bolt awake. The bats were screeching in pitches too high to hear; they were saying something like “Oh!” and “No!” and “Blow!” Tip was gone, and Tay was asleep in some richly enviable dream. Rain leapt to her feet, her senses as alert as an animal’s, and cried out, not even in words.

The fire had gone down and she stepped in the embers in her haste, because she had heard Tip moan, perhaps. She fel to her hands and knees and looked over the edge of the bluff. Tip lay six or eight feet below, on his chest.

She remembered someone caled Zackers, but not what or where about him. “Tip?” she caled.

The moon was lowering at this hour but there was enough light stil for her to see an animal of some sort, an overgrown grite perhaps, and a partner or mate behind it, growling and tensing to jump.

She reached for the first thing her hand fel upon, the shel, and she almost threw it, but something stopped her. “Blow!” said the bats. She put the broken tip to her lips and puffed up her cheeks and forced air through the aperture as if it were a trumpetina.

The sound screeched like ogre’s fingernails on an ogre’s slate, and any remaining bats in the cave fled the premises permanently. But so did the grites. Then Rain slithered down to crouch beside Tip and check to see how hurt he was.

Not very, it turned out. He wouldn’t admit until the next morning that he had gotten up in the middle of the night to pee off the edge of their cliffporch, and misjudged. So, maybe not so hot to be a boy, thought Rain, but she didn’t say so.

She remembered the Clock crashing down a slope the time her forgotten companions had come across the Ivory Tiger in the poppy fields. That earthquake. And the other time, when the Clock slid off into Kelswater, up to its gils in fatal water. Now Tip himself was hurt from a fal. To aim high—to risk the prospect—wel, there was no assurance of safety. Ever. As the world turned, it kept sloping itself into new treacheries. To live at al meant to risk faling at every step.

He couldn’t walk just yet; his ankle or his shin was bruised. He could hardly name the location of the pain, and Rain couldn’t tel. She wished Little Daffy were here. “A day’s rest won’t hurt,” she said.

“You are in such a hurry, can’t stop to help relieve an unmilked cow. So you should go on without me,” he taunted her.

She didn’t reply, just went scavenging for breakfast.

Later. “You saved my life, you know. Those overgrown grites were a nasty branch of the grite family. They were al ready to jump. I couldn’t have fended them off for long, or gotten away. After al this, to be eaten by beasts in the wild! A certain mythic justice, probably, but no fun for me.”

“After al this?” said Rain. And now, since she had saved his life, he more or less had to tel her something. Otherwise he’d have died and she wouldn’t even have known a thing about him, realy.

“I know you were a fairly useless butler to Miss Ironish,” she declared.

“A studied ineffectuality,” he protested. “Kept me from being pestered for ever more boring chores.”

This is what he told her. He had come to Shiz from Munchkinland a year or so before he had met her in St. Prowd’s. He was an orphan but had escaped from the house of the person who had both raised him and imprisoned him. “A single woman,” said Tip. “A powerful and important woman, who had dozens of minions at her beck and cal. I never knew why she paid attention to me, but she kept me closest of al, under her eye and in her chambers. I couldn’t bear it. Al the time the ministers of war came and went, and I had to crouch on a stool behind her formal chair.”

“She sounds very important indeed,” said Rain politely. “A charwoman at some fine hotel, perhaps?”

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“Don’t make a fool of me. I just saved your life, remember?”

So he told her. “I was in the household of the infamous Mombey, who serves as Eminence of Munchkinland, and who directs the war of defense against the mongrel Ozians.”

“Mongrel Ozians?” Rain had to laugh. She was quite a mongrel herself, part Quadling, part Arjiki, part Munchkinlander.

“
They
invaded Munchkinland,” Tip reminded her, but then he shook his head. “Oh, but that’s only part of why I left. I couldn’t bear the endless posturing. The Emperor of Oz may be a demiurge or whatever he has named himself, but La Mombey herself is a sorceress of no mean skil.”

“Do you think she has found the Grimmerie?” asked Rain.

“Al I know is that she has had her people looking for it,” said Tip sadly. “For the book, and for the descendants of the Wicked Witch of the West, for in their hands the book would reveal its secrets most quickly, and Mombey is in urgent need of some sort of surge in the attempt to beat back the Ozians. Whether she got the book first or the Emperor’s men did, I can’t tel; but if it’s truly in the custody of one or the other of those adversaries, things wil change before long.”

“Yes, they wil,” said Rain. She told him who she was, and that she was heading for Kiamo Ko to see if her parents were stil alive, since they had had the Grimmerie last. Then, because Tip clearly hated divulging secrets of his past as much as she did, she kissed him on the mouth so there would be no more talking for a while.

She colected the kisses one by one by one, but she didn’t count them.

God’s Great-Niece

I.

Agood season to walk. Later—and not al that much later—Rain would look upon the six weeks it took them to find their way to Kiamo Ko as the happiest period of her young life.

They forded the Gilikin River easily enough, swimming when they had to, wading the rest of the way. When they reached the Vinkus River, a more treacherous waterspil channeled between obdurate yelow cliffs, they feared they’d been stopped. Spent days walking first north and then south along its banks, becoming desperate. Tay responded to their anxiety and made a whimpering sound but wouldn’t plunge into the water until they were ready to forge ahead too.

Finaly, at a stretch where the river widened and slowed, they came across a beaver dam. How the colony had managed to build against such force was hardly short of miraculous, thought Tip. Rain, less inclined to consider anything miraculous, remarked that if they could interview a talking Beaver they might learn a good deal.

Such a moment presented itself once they were almost across. What had looked like detritus caught up against the brackwork of fortifications on the far side turned out to be a lodge. And, “Hulo there, don’t step too hard or you’l bring down the ceiling on my mother-in-law,” said a Beaver, turning a fish over in her paws and eyeing them with wariness and courtesy alike.