Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (67 page)

“There won’t be a St. Prowd’s if Mombey has the book and can torture my father into decoding it for her. If he’s able. Or maybe being so powerful Mombey can decipher some of it herself.”

“You could read it,” said Tip to Rain. “You told me.”

“Yes, wel,” said Rain, “I was only learning to read back then. Not having a history of other writing to complicate me, I managed. Lucky guesses.”

“It’s in her blood,” said Chistery, pointing at Rain. “Elphaba could read it at once, I’m told. She used it to help give me language.”

“You’re right about one thing,” said the dwarf to Rain. “I never took up with political or religious clans. Never cared to. But I suppose since my wife is a Munchkinlander and our children wil be part Munchkin—”

“Not to spring any surprises on you, darling, but I’m so far beyond the changes that I’m more of a dwarf than you are,” said Little Daffy.

“Our symbolic children,” he said to her. “The children of your home-town in Center Munch. You’ve professed a love for your besmirched land. You’ve persuaded me to join you wherever you are. If you’re on that side, so I am.”

“I love you too, ducks. Though what Munchkinland has become, a shame. A bloody shame.”

The Lion turned his head this way and that as if not quite believing what he heard. The dwarf and Little Daffy were holding hands.

Tip said, “Wel, I’ve been al over Loyal Oz and renegade Munchkinland, and it seems to me that no people own the land they live on. The land owns them. The land feeds them by growing them their wheat and such, in the Corn Basket of Munchkinland, or growing them their meadows for the grazing of livestock, in the agricultural patches of Gilikin. Or growing them their emeralds in the mines in the Glikkus, or their windswept pampas or steppes in the wide grasslands west of here, which I’ve never seen, but which support the horse cultures of the Scrow and other tribes.”

“Bolocks. Natural geography may be hospitable—or not—but human history claims geography,” argued the Lion. “Love for nature is a hobby for the mentaly unfit. History trumps geography. And thus you can’t blame the Munchkinlanders for defending themselves, however cruel it makes them.”

Dorothy hadn’t spoken so far. She drummed one hand on the tabletop and put the other hand on her hip. None of them of course had ever seen the Auntie Em about whom she complained, but Rain guessed that Dorothy looked quite a bit like old Auntie Em right about now.

“I’ve seen a fair amount of Oz, too, you know,” she said, “and as far as I’m concerned loving any part of it without loving the whole thing is a load of fresh ripe hooey. Not that I’m especialy enamored of any of Oz on this trip, mind you. But I have a treasury of song in my heart and I can summon up affection for anything with just a little concentration. Would you like me to sing?”

“No,” they al said.

“Too bad,” she replied, and stood up.

She got out about four lines.

O beautiful for spacious skies,

For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

Above the fruited plain…

Little Daffy was already in tears. Mr. Boss was roling his eyes heavenward and plugging his ears. Iskinaary murmured to Rain, “What rainbow is she
from
?”

“Let her go on,” said Tip, who had no authority here, but they obeyed him as a matter of courtesy. He was a guest, after al.

America! America!

God shed his grace on thee,

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea!

“There’s that sea thing again, it makes me want to heave,” said Brrr.

“Good is always crowned, isn’t it?” said Little Daffy. “The argument for royalty.”

“What’s amerika? Part of that game the beauty boys used to play, shamerika?” asked Mr. Boss.

“It’s another name for Kansas,” said Dorothy.

“I thought you hated Kansas,” said the Goose.

“Let me have my say, if you’re ready for it. Or I’l sing the next verse.”

“We’re ready, we’re ready.”

“Everyone has a right to love the land that gives them the things they need to live,” said Dorothy. “It gives them beauty to look at, and food to eat, and neighbors to bicker with and then eventualy to marry.

But I think, now I’ve seen a bit more of America and a lot more of Oz, that your own devotion to your familiar homeland should inspire you to alow other people to embrace their homelands as beautiful, too.

That’s what the song says. That’s why I sang it. You can’t see the shining sea from the purple mountains—”

“I should hope not,” said the Lion. “You’d just cave.”

Rain said, “I don’t know about the mountain and sea business. But I suppose we’re saying something of the same thing. It’s more important to try to stop what may be about to happen, whichever way it goes—because it’s al worthwhile to someone. The beaver dam is worth something to the beavers, the—the shel to the lake creature that built it—the roost to the hen, the swamp to the marshstalker. Nether How to my father.”

“And this place to me,” said Chistery, “though Kiamo Ko could do with a bit more in the way of central heating.”

“Are we going to decide what to do, though?” asked Rain. “That’s why we’ve come here to sit together for a few moments.” Iskinaary said, “Wel, Chistery is too old to fly anyplace.”

“Speak for yourself,” replied the flying monkey, but admitted he had obligations to Nanny that would keep him from leaving his highland home.

“Are we to break up into groups? One to the Emerald City, one to Colwen Grounds, and try to intercept the Grimmerie somehow?” asked Iskinaary. “I’m sorry, Rain, but I’m not quite getting your drift.”

“I don’t have a plan yet. We’re working on it together.”

“I am
not
going back to Munchkinland, thank you very much,” said Dorothy. “Don’t forget there’s an order of execution on my head.”

“My countryfolk
were
beastly to you,” agreed Little Daffy. “But don’t be harsh on them, dear. They’re under so much stress, invaded by Loyal Oz. Now, as to schemes. Personaly,
I
have precious little interest in ever visiting the Emerald City again. Who would ever give
me
the time of day there, if the sons of the EC and Gilikin are dying in battle against my countrymen?”

“Against the Animals,” corrected the Lion. “But point taken. Sentiment is fine over a round table, but once you decide to come down from this high peak, you have to make a choice one way or the other.

That’s the human condition.

“I know,” he added. “And I’m a Lion. Same difference.”

“We’l sleep on it,” said Rain.

Once again she was asleep and then she heard a voice, but she could hardly tel what it was saying. She half-woke, and roled over in the moonlight to see if there was a mole, or maybe a goldfish come up from the fishwel in the basements. The only thing she saw was the iridescent shel, its usual gleam even brighter against the gloom of a mountain night in late summer.

She picked her way over Tip, careful not to disturb him, and hardly knowing what she intended, she retraced the steps she’d taken earlier in the day and walked up the stairs to Elphaba’s chamber.

Snaggle-toothed autumn was loping in. A jackal moon was assembling its features in the sky. Rain had heard that the constelation appeared only once in a generation or so. It didn’t last long, but while it lasted, peasants and mil laborers alike considered it a time of peril and possibility.

Without Tip to watch her, she had a different kind of courage. She creaked open the shutters of the Witch’s great window, both sides, and the moon stepped through spiderweb fretwork into the chamber.

A patter at her heels made her turn. Tay had appeared from nowhere. It must have sensed her moving at night. She smiled at it—and almost could have sworn it smiled back. Though a creature of the wild has no smile we can recognize.

“Look in the glass,” said Tay.

“You can’t talk,” she said, not alarmed; she realized she was sleep-walking.

“I know,” said Tay. “I’m sorry. Look in the glass.”

Because this was not a nightmare, and because a calm had lit upon her, she wasn’t scared to look. She rubbed the surface of the globe and huffed upon it to make it shiny. The moonlight helped, one sphere to another. Tay leapt to the table and entwined, almost snakelike, around the carved legs of the stand.

The initial sense was of flatness—more like peering through a porthole than into a fishbowl. She remembered staring at a page in the Grimmerie once, when a glassy circlet had shown an unidentified figure gesturing at her. Trying to make a landfal of some message or other. She left that memory behind, and leaned closer.

At first she saw nothing, just shifting smudges. Clouds seen from below the surface of a lake, as if you were a fish. Or it might be clouds seen from above, she thought, if you were a kind of creature who wasn’t tethered by gravity to the time and place in which you were born, and if you could approach from anywhere, see anything.

The mothy batting puled apart, like the spun sugarbrittle sold at Scandal Day. She began to focus.

It took a moment to realize she was examining something of what Dorothy had been warbling about. The mountains of Oz stood up first—not as in a map, flattened out and drawn, but built up in miniature, as if in pastry-dough. From a great distance mountains show earliest; they are the first face of a world. She could see Oz the way Dorothy had said to see it in a song, al at once: Mount Runcible to the north, poking up like a king-hil, uncrowded and pompous; and the Great Kels in their scimitar curve, bending to the left and then angling to the right, toward the south, softening. She could see that the Quadling Kels and the Wend Hardings were just smaler cousins of the Great Kels, and that the Madeleines and the Cloth Hils were second cousins who had moved out of town to get a little room. And the Scalps, up in the Glikkus, were the high bishops of the whole affair, in their emerald crowns, although of course she couldn’t see the emeralds.

The picture shifted. An angle of moonlight picked up the silver that shines on water, and then she could see the eight or ten queenly lakes of Oz drawn out as neatly as Madame Chortlebush could have done on a map. The long silvered leaf of Restwater at the center, the birthing pool of al of Oz; and bootblack deadly Kelswater not far off. Spottily, here and there, the turquoise lakes that depended on mountain runoff for their bounty: Lake Chorge in Gilikin, Mossmere and Ilswater in Munchkinland, and a shifting lake in the Thousand Year Grasslands at the far west of the Kels. The moving lake that she’d heard came and went at its own choice, drawing thousands of prairie beasts like magnets back and forth to its iron wil.

Another shift of the snout of the jackal moon, pointing out the forests of Oz. A lot of Oz was woods, from the snarl of northern wilderness, the Great Gilikin Forest, to virtualy every slope and vale in regions mountainous or gentle. And see, the rustling abundance of the eastern Corn Basket, a neatly governed patchwork cousin to the wild grasses of the west. Look how the marshes of Quadling Country are the damp wet footing for the tal pines of the Great Gilikin Forest fifteen hundred miles to the north.

She peered for the slopes below Kiamo Ko, to see if the Five Lakes around Nether How came to view. Reluctantly, like shy fish, they winked up at her. But this was a dream, and like al dreams it had some conditions. One of them is that she couldn’t push for more than it would give. She couldn’t screw her focus tighter, or by force of desire pul the world into greater resolution. Though she thought she could even find the kindly hilock of Nether How itself, she couldn’t make it any clearer. She couldn’t see the house. She couldn’t see her mother. She just couldn’t see her mother.

Neither could she see anyone, she realized, not human or Animal or animal. From the height of an angel, there seemed to be no sign of occupation of this vast textured complexity. Not even a city—not even the Emerald City, which she might have expected to spy blooming in the center of Oz like a big throbbing bee stinging the living organism, or sucking the bloom of its sweetness.

Then, even in her dreaminess, her mind remembered the map she and Tip had found in the shop in Shiz on that rainy afternoon. She remembered the story of Tip and his trip to Ev, out of Oz across the deadly sands, and of the stamp of the shel on the left edge of the map, beyond the Outer Vinkus. She rose on tiptoe to see beyond the sands north of Mount Runcible, and south of Quadling Country. She torqued her face to try to peer beyond the sands west of the Thousand Year Grasslands. But the jackal moon wouldn’t loan its light through the glass at so oblique an angle. She could only see what it would show her.

As if she had done the world wrong by being curious, the picture of Oz began to shrink, sinking deeper in. But then she realized the dioramic glimpse was no less particular, just smaler, just sized differently.

It took up a modest segment of the globed glass, like no more than a scrap of colored apple peel plastered on an ornament from Lurlinemas, leaving the rest unknown, unfounded. So much unknown.

The clouds began to move in. She guessed her dream was about over, and she wondered if she needed to walk back downstairs or if she could just drift, too, like the clouds, and let the dream wake her in her bed when it wanted. But the clouds swirled some, and cleared, and she looked again just in case.

Al she saw was her own face. That face she hardly ever dared scrutinize. She identified the Quadling cheekbones from Candle, the stiff, thick, flowing dark hair from Lir. Oh, what a dream this was! For she saw herself green, green, if you could believe it.

She laughed at the gifts of sight and blindness, and turned to go.

“Did you see?” asked the crocodrilos, roling its eyes into a pair of sixes.

“Oh, I saw.”

“What did you see?” asked the ghosts of bees, crawling out of the hive and standing in a ceremonial line as if she were the new Lord Mayor of Kiamo Ko.

“I saw the hils and waters of Oz, the growth and wetness and dryness of it.”

“What else did you see?” asked the smile of the wolf teeth.

“I saw no sign of any crying child smacked too often by a tired mother, or any old Dame Beaver wanting release from her daughter-in-law. I saw no kidnapped father, and no mother gone AWOL.”