Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (63 page)

She introduced herself as Luliaba. The lodge was empty at this hour except for her aging mother-in-law, who wanted to be put to the sea in a coracle and alowed to sail to her doom, but she was too beloved by the clan and so they had locked her in her room, the better to cherish her.

“Put to sea?” said Rain, to whom the phrase seemed excessive.

“Term we have, in Beaver lore,” said Luliaba companionably. “The mortal goal of our species is to build a dam big enough to flood al of Oz, as legend says once happened. Then al the rivers would flow together, making the mythical sea of story and song, and on the other side of that misty rainbow al the Beavers who’ve gone before wil be having a fish fry, and waiting for us there. She’s anxious to git going, y’see. She’s been learning off new marinade recipes that have come in fashion since her lolymama and lolypapa died, and she’s afraid she’l go soft in the noggin and forgit them before she gets there. The dear.”

“She thinks al that, she’s already soft,” said Rain, for whom the mystery of the silent animal had more potency than that of the chattering classes.

“The notion of a world of water, it always makes me feel il,” said Tip. “But tel us how you came to build this magnificent barricade.”

“I’m chief engineer on this job site,” said Luliaba. “And I don’t mind saying that the sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation upon which to build. Two big ole stag-head oaks, uprooted upriver upmonth, floated into view one morning pretty as you please, and lodged for a while against some rocks you can’t see. About a third of the way out. Before they could work their way free, we’d established the underwater salients, using cedar logs we had stripped and at the ready. Cedar don’t rot under water like some woods, you know. By sunset the first day we’d begun the breakwater to slow the pressure moving against the twiggy firmament. Come a couple more days, we’d already completed the initial span. Your basic herringbone. Long since subsumed by upgrades done by artisan builders, of course. But the essentials we git al in place on day one.”

“Let me out!” cried the mother-in-law from below.

“Can we bring her something, maybe? A present?” asked Tip. “In exchange for your letting us cross over?”

“Bring me a gun!” cried the mother-in-law. “I’l shoot my way out, or shoot my brains out if that don’t work!”

“A tasty flank of otter would be awful welcome.” Luliaba leered at Tay.

“We’l be going now,” said Rain.

“Take me with!” came from inside the lodge. “I’l be good! I won’t foul the nest any more than I can help it!”

“If we come back this way, we’l try to bring you a little coracle,” caled Tip, looking at Rain and shrugging.

“Not too little! I’m not the glass of fashion and the mirror of form I was in my springwater days!”

The travelers headed up the bank. Tip kept Tay safe in his arms. “You’re awfuly sweet to a talky old Beaver,” said Rain. “Do you realy mean you’d bring her a boat?”

“Wel, if the opportunity presented itself.”

“Why are you so nice?”

“You make me nice. I’m pleased this al happened—that I ended up bursting out of your wardrobe instead of, say, Miss Ironish’s. Or Miss Igilvy’s.”

“Or Scarly’s?” She could risk making that almost-joke now that they had put so many miles between themselves and St. Prowd’s.

“Or Scarly’s.” He was sound and firm, and didn’t rise to the ribbing. “It’s just as Luliaba said. The sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation on which to build. I might have gone in any direction once I escaped from Colwen Grounds. I might have gone to the Emerald City to throw myself on the mercy of the Emperor.”

“Smart move, avoiding that. For a deity, he isn’t widely known for his mercy.”

“Even ending up at Shiz, I might have found some sort of position at one of the coleges. Or hired out for that Bear, to help him in his shop in exchange for a mattress. I might even have come to St. Prowd’s before you’d been moved out to the annex. Realy!—doesn’t coincidence hurt the sense of reason? What’s the likelihood that I’d have escaped the court of La Mombey, where I’d already heard of the Grimmerie, only to stumble across you, who seem to be one of its closest relatives?”

“We don’t do probability theory until third year at St. Prowd’s, but I’d guess about ozilion to one.” She trained her eyes on the tal grasses to select the best path across the plateau rising west of the Vinkus River. Butterflies hung like slow confetti as far as the eye could see. “The chances are so slim, in fact”—she paused as the thought consolidated—“that it might make me wonder if La Mombey had charmed you to find me.”

“Wel.” He was taken aback by that. No easy riposte to offer. Finaly he shrugged and said, “If she did, we have something to thank her for at last. But you’d expect she’d also have charmed me to kidnap you and take you back to her, so that even if she didn’t have the Grimmerie, she’d have you in custody. Then if the Emperor’s men found the book first, at least they wouldn’t have you, too.”

“Maybe she did charm you to do that,” said Rain, though she didn’t realy believe it. “You just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

“If she did, then you cast a stronger charm upon me,” he said.

“Stop that. You sound like one of the sily schoolgirls on the second floor.”

They walked in sunlight, in shadow, speaking and not speaking. The hours were long and their feet hurt, and their stomachs rumbled like thunder. They postponed fretting about what they would find at Kiamo Ko; it couldn’t be helped from this distance, not yet. Gradualy the sentinel mountains emerged from heat haze, to supervise their progress. First filmy banks, easily mistaken for a low storm front on the horizon; then icy translucencies; then, too soon—al too soon—the silhoutte of Oz’s natural ramparts. The Great Kels.

Foot ahead of foot, step step step. They were in little need of omens. They trusted to the charm of chance. Why not? It had done them no harm so far.

2.

From the east the Kels rose, wrinkled solidity, and scored to two-thirds of their height by innumerable aromatic conifers. Few low valeys, but as Rain and Tip climbed they kept finding pockets of higher pastureland. Hung tarns. Sudden upland meadows where Arjiki tribespeople had been settled forever.

Like the chancel above the Sleeve of Ghastile, these vilages were often invisible to climbers until the last few steps, and then the settlements would appear as if sprinkled there by the wind. The huts were made of stone and the roofs of thatch and grass, bundled in bristly fagots and weighed down by rocks tied into place. The first vilage on Knobblehead Pike was Fanarra, said the vilagers, pointing to it and naming it. Tip and Rain could understand little else but the mountain courtesy that gestured, “Come, eat. Here, sleep. Blanket.” They treated Tip and Rain as a married couple, bedding them close, which Rain didn’t mind and Tip didn’t seem to either, as far as Rain could determine. Upon leaving the vilage they noticed other couples not much older than they were. They saw an infant in a sling who wailed every time the teenage mother hit it.

“That isn’t right,” murmured Tip as they passed.

“Send it down the everlasting sea in a little coracle, it’l be fine,” said Rain. Tip didn’t talk to her for a while after that.

Fanarra led, another day’s steep hike, to Upper Fanarra, where the welcome was equaly warm. Someone slaughtered a young goat and it was roasted at night, and the whole vilage celebrated. Tip sang a Munchkinlander spinniel that was intended to be comic, but the vilagers closed their eyes and listened with painful care as if it were a voice from the beyond.

Silly me tender, silly me sweet,

Tickle me under the bandstand.

Handle me merciful, handle me neat

And I’ll tickle you under the waistband.

“I think Tip is tipsy,” said Rain that night, so he tickled her.

The vilagers of Upper Fanarra responded eagerly to the mention of Kiamo Ko, and by wheeling motions they suggested it wasn’t a day or two farther on, three at most. Coming up for late summer now, thought Rain. Probably autumn arrived earlier in the high hils. Rain and Tip needed to warm themselves around a breakfast campfire for a few moments before starting out.

“I’m stil thinking about that little baby,” Tip confessed. “I wish we had taken it with us.”

“We can’t even hold our liquor, can we,” said Rain, “how are we going to hold a baby?”

“Not for us,” he said. “I just mean, to save it from that poor exhausted mother.”

“We’re not old enough for a child. We’re children stil.”

“How old are you?” he asked her.

“Somewhere between school and colege.”

“No, realy.”

“I don’t know. I’ve grown used to ignoring the question. By the standards of the students at St. Prowd’s, I seemed to be about thirteen from some points of view, and fifteen from others. But perhaps I’m eleven, and quick for my age. How old are you?”

He shook his head. “Another way we are made for each other. I can tel even less clearly than you can. I just tramp on and on and I feel as if I never change much. I’ve been a boy since I was born.” He had raised the subject, but now he seemed to regret it; there was tension in his face, and he walked ahead for a while. She let him go, looking at his stride, the easy throb of his lengthening hair against the straps of his rucksack. She knew what it was to have a broken childhood. It was easier to understand Tip, she now saw, than it had been to figure out the girls of St. Prowd’s. That wasn’t their fault, of course; perhaps she’d been supercilious to them. Too late now.

She caught up to him. “Tel me about La Mombey, then.”

That eased the invisible rack of distress on his shoulders. “She’s a mighty dangerous woman to have as a landlady,” was al he would say at first, but he relented. “She’s got scented oil instead of blood, I think; she slithers inside her clothes.”

“Do you mean that realy, or are you prettifying through language?”

He laughed. “I’m not sure. Sometimes you say something to be pretty and it turns out to be pretty accurate. I guess I mean she’s a mystery even to me, and I’ve lived with her my whole life.”

“Wel,” she said, “are you her son, then?”

“I am not.” Said firmly.

“If you don’t know who your parents are, how can you be so sure?”

“For a good many years Mombey was a ferocious old hag, like someone you’d see grubbing for coins in the street outside the opera. She had bristles on her chin, and her back was bent double. She couldn’t walk but for sticks and my shoulder; I was her ambulatory cane. Since she was unable to move without me, I went everywhere with her and I saw everything.”

“So she’s too old to be your mother, you’re saying.”

“Yes. I suppose she could be my great-great-great-grandmother. But who cares?”

“What is she doing without you now you’ve run away?”

“Oh, I’m talking about long ago, before she was named Eminence of Munchkinland. You wouldn’t recognize her by the description I’ve just given. I hardly can remember it myself.”

“What happened? She found a spa and took the waters?”

“No. But she dragged me on a long journey over the sands to one of the duchy principalities, I think it was Ev—”

Rain stopped in her tracks. “No one can cross the deadly sands.”

“You believe that?”

“Everyone believes it—isn’t it true?”

“Oh, wel, if everyone believes it.” He was mocking her. “And lunch pails grow on trees, too, you know, in some parts of Oz. And even the little bunnies have their own Bunnytown.”

“Don’t make fun of me. I only had one year of schooling, and we concentrated on the life and times of Handy Mandy, a child burglar.”

“Wel, I have had no schooling but whatever I picked up at Mombey’s hip. And those so-caled deadly sands aren’t impossible to cross. They’re only deadly if you’re stupid enough not to pack properly.

Though, to be fair, Mombey may have made it easier because of some spel or other. We had a sand sledge and pressed on through windstorms a week in duration, and when we arrived Mombey presented herself to some second-rate duchess who served us vile sandwiches on alabaster plates. The duchess knew a secret for changing the shape of her head and her body, and performed it for us as a kind of afternoon entertainment. Like charades. Or putting on a tableau vivant. There was only a screen at the end of the room, and she showed us that there were no trapdoors or hidden chambers in which a bevy of beautiful women could wait their turn to pretend to be the duchess. Her magic was limited to that one party trick, but she did enjoy demonstrating it. Her beauty made Mombey look even more hideous by comparison.”

“So…?”

“So when we left, we returned via a lengthy tour of other places where Mombey had private audiences with various potentates, and I watched the sledge. Eventualy we reemerged in northern Gilikin, making landfal someplace near Mount Runcible. Mombey drove the vehicle into a guley, so we had to catch the train heading south from the Pertha Hils. And on the train old Mombey went off to use the powder room, and she powdered herself pretty damn pretty, because I didn’t recognize her when she came back.”

“Had she bought the charm, do you think?”

“I didn’t ask. Later I wondered if the duchess of Ev woke up on her fainting couch the morning after we said good-bye to find herself dead. But La Mombey has never looked back, and presents herself effectively. Shortly after that, she managed to become elevated to Eminence of Munchkinland, due to some odd distant relationship to old Pastorius.” Rain didn’t know ancient Oz history and didn’t much care, but Tip had never talked so much about his past before. She didn’t want to cut him off. She let him go on about Pastorius and how he was married to the last reigning Ozma, caled Ozma the Bilious, who died of an accidental poisoning involving rat extermination pelets. Pastorius was to serve as Ozma Regent until his daughter grew up, but then the Wizard of Oz arrived in his famous baloon, blah blah, blah blah, and that was the end of Pastorius.

“And the baby?” said Rain, thinking of the Arjiki baby in the papoose.

“You realy have wandered a far foreign strand, haven’t you? Old crones and cronies cherish the legend that the baby is nestled in some cradle underground, waiting to reemerge in Oz’s darkest hour. The second coming of Ozma, they cal it. Since the first coming was a bit of a blunder.”