Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (71 page)

Perhaps another skil of Elephants that we so-caled humans would be wiser if we could learn.

“You left, under whatever circumstances,” said Lir. He hadn’t moved off the table since he’d been put there, and he was roling in his excrement, that which the helpers had not been able to reach to scrape away. There was so much of interest to smel in manure, but in any case, Trism didn’t seem offended.

Lir tried to work his huge pie-plate front hooves to the floor, to close the gap that Trism stil maintained.

“You left,” said Lir, “and you went over.”

“They were always looking for you. As soon as they’d figured out who you were. You were behind the flight of the Birds, and the Emperor sorted that out easily. And of course Cherrystone knew what the Emperor knew. They put us together soon enough, you and me, and they had me folowed, hoping I’d lead them to you. They thought I couldn’t resist your charms enough to save your skin.”

“I was never very supple, but I seem to have sidestepped them a good many years running.”

“Yes, and sidestepped me.”

“I didn’t know where you’d gone, Trism.”

“And you had a wife. You told me about Candle but you never told me about a wife. You had a wife and a child on the way.” Lir supposed Trism had a point. “If it makes any difference to you, I didn’t know she was my wife at first. Though that’s a bit of a story to explain.”

“I remember.
She
told me once. You think I have ever forgotten a scrap about you? A single blessed word?”

No, Lir didn’t think that, not any longer. He could smel that it was true. “But why did you come
here
? If I could go underground in Oz for ten or fifteen years, why didn’t you?”

“Can you fathom what they did to me, looking for you?” Trism didn’t know which of Lir’s Elephant eyes to look into; you couldn’t look into both at once. Then Trism turned around and raked up his tunic and dropped his leggings to his knees, and bent over the sideboard with its medicines and the scrub brushes. His behind was stil high and beautiful, if puckered on the flanks of it, and Lir reached forward and caressed it with his nose, traced its cleavage. But then, as Trism roled a little onto his right side, Lir saw that his mate was not baring himself for mortification or attention. The skin on the forward side, from the second rib down to his left calf, was vitrified pink, hairless as a boiled ham.

“Cherrystone did this,” said Trism, and pushed Lir’s attentive nose away and dressed himself. “Under the Emperor of Oz, your uncle Shel Thropp, Cherrystone did this to me.
Cherrystone
. Do you think I would stay in Oz where I could be caught again? Slowly peeled away with hot knives? Until I had decided to seek you out and lead them to you, betray you to protect myself from being shaved like a carrot? I’m lucky this is al they took off.”

“You did that for me,” said Lir.

“Don’t look for satisfaction. None of us knows why we did what we did back then. I know why I’m doing what I’m doing now. And I’m here to ask you to listen to Mombey’s request, and help us.” Lir listened. His ears were big enough now to hear anything.

“Your uncle, taking a leaf out of the old tricks of one of his predecessors, the Wizard of Oz, has been launching an attack on the Animal armies, which have been pushed entirely out of the Madeleines into the Wend Falows. Another foothold in Munchkinland, see. Shel has ordered the construction of smal-scale aerial baloons filed with light gas. He’s sending them over the hils to explode upon impact as they descend. The panic is immense and the Animals are close to scattering, or worse yet, surrendering. If we lose the Wend Falows, the EC Messiars wil be in Colwen Grounds in a matter of days, and it’s al over.”

“Frankly, I’m surprised the Animals didn’t scatter at the first chance.”

“Many of them remember their parents having to flee Loyal Oz a generation ago, under the Wizard’s Animal Adverse laws. They harbor an old grievance, and when Animals fight, they fight fiercer than humans. But few creatures, human or Animal, wil fight to the death to defend the honor of a dead generation. So the strictest of Mombey’s human commanders are in charge of the Animals, and the Animal conscripts receive a more merciless punishment for going AWOL than I did.”

“The Animals are an army of prisoners, effectively.”

“Indentured mercenaries. But without pay. You said it. And when those prisoners finaly panic and break loose, the bedlam wil not be believed. We’re in the final days of this war, one way or another.”

“So why have you brought me here?”

“It wasn’t my idea. Mombey brought you, to read the book to us.”

“I stil don’t understand. How are you involved, then?”

“You remember my original training in the Emerald City? Your mother long ago had given the Wizard of Oz a page from the Grimmerie,
On the Proper Training and Handling of Dragons
. I was the chief dragonmaster. I trained those dragons who attacked you years ago, the ones we later slaughtered before we fled.”

“I remember. Trism the cute dragon mesmerist.”

“When I left Loyal Oz, I carried with me the secrets of the trade. It’s hard enough to secure a dragon’s egg and raise it to life, and keep it alive—dragons don’t like Oz. Oz is too wet and ful of life for them.

Dragons are desert creatures. But a few years ago Cherrystone got his hands on a clutch of eggs and managed to raise them to maturity. The creatures were to be used in the attack on Haugaard’s Keep.”

“I heard about that,” said Lir, though he didn’t understand that his daughter had been partly responsible for slowing the attack. “Do you remember Brrr, the so-caled Cowardly Lion? He told me what he knew about that campaign. He was in the vicinity when it happened.”

“I never met that Lion.”

“The dragons were destroyed, I understand.”

“Not al of them. One of them escaped, and it was found tending its wounds on the banks of Ilswater in the south of Munchkinland. It was captured by Mombey’s people, brought north, and stabled not far from here. It yielded a clutch of eggs a short time later. They came to term.”

“With no male to fertilize them? Capable dragon.”

“There is much we don’t know about dragons.” Trism stil had that I’molder-than-you tone, Lir noticed.

“So you’ve raised the baby dragons up, you traitor dragonmaster.”

“I have indeed,” he said. “And not a moment too soon. They’re ready to go. But Mombey knows this is her last chance. She can’t risk their failure. The dragons have to do the job right.”

“She’s not one for letting things slide? Just my luck.”

“She’s been smart about keeping the Munchkinlanders focused and fired up. That show trial of Dorothy happened in the nick of time, as interest was flagging and recruitment was off, what with the endless stalemate. The arrival of Dorothy and the attention paid to her trial helped Mombey corral her first battalion of Animals in a single week.”

“The conscription of Animals was promoted as defense, but realy she needed to open a new front in the war. I see.”

“Yes. General Jinjuria had lured Cherrystone in Haugaard’s Keep but forgot to figure in the cost of keeping him under siege there. She can’t knock him out of Haugaard’s Keep; it’s said to be so wel fortified that he has imported a barge ful of dancing girls and a craps game that goes on al night. He’s running a fucking resort there on Restwater. He keeps Jinjuria guessing and occupied. And she can’t rush what’s left of her forces up to the Falows. Something’s got to give, and soon.”

“So you’l use the dragons to attack Haugaard’s Keep.”

“If you can help, we’l use the dragons to attack the Emerald City.”

He had said it. Lir turned his head and looked at Trism with the other eye, to see if his first eye had missed something. “There are civilians in the Emerald City.”

“There are civilians in both armies, too. At least they were civilians before they were drafted. Look, if we can strike against the Emerald City hard enough, we might be able to pul Cherrystone and his floating vacationers out of Haugaard’s Keep; they would be recaled to defend the Emperor. Munchkinland could retake Restwater and offer a truce. How many civilians’ lives wil have been saved then?”

“A lot of ifs, I suppose.”

“With your great schnoz, can you smel possibility in this plan?”

It was a shame to say that he could. So he didn’t say it. He just looked at Trism. They had both grown old enough to have learned how to ignore the needs of individual lives for the purported good of the lives of nations.

Trism knew him stil; he saw what Lir was thinking; he threw himself against where Lir’s arms would be if Lir had had arms; Lir wrapped the shattered stranger in his trunk and held his best beloved tight.

II.

Perhaps they ought to have folowed Temper Bailey’s advice, because the track they chose to wander along faltered and lost itself in a smal but confounding wood. The leaves were beginning to change, the lavender of pearlfruit and the red of red maple and the gold of golden maple. The tarnishy tang of fox musk under the jealous snout of the jackal moon, who wanted to be down there with them—it was al a glorious adventure. But they were lost and doing no one much good.

“We’l find our way out tomorrow,” said Dorothy. “I think there’s some song about that. There ought to be.”

The next morning they woke up even more lost. A bank of fog canted from the warmish earth into the chiling air, rather thicker than what they might have expected at this time of year. It wasn’t only visibility that gave out, but also sound. Stifled. A clammy tightness seemed to filter through the lower branches, as if the air was congested. Any leaves much above head level dissolved into a pale ruddy glow.

“You stay close to me, Tay,” said Rain.

“Shal we sing to keep up our nerve?” asked Dorothy. No one bothered to reply.

Then Brrr paused and said, “I know what this is. Or I think I do.”

He had spoken so seldom recently that they were al surprised. They waited for him to continue.

“I saw this once before, this trick of atmospherics. When I was hardly more than a cub. I think this is the Ozmists. But what are they doing so far south? We can’t have wandered off course so badly that we missed Shiz and entered the Great Gilikin Forest? That’s where they live, as I understood it.”

“Not a chance,” said Mr. Boss, who of them al had traveled the widest in Oz, and for the longest time. “We’d’ve had to cross the rail line to the Pertha Hils, and we never did. So we’re stil west of the forest and west of Shiz. Though whether we’re heading south stil or have veered some other way I can’t say in this swamp of wet tissues. Anyhow, I never heard of any
Ozmists
. Who are they? The essence of royalists gone to ground, literaly, and their appetite for the crown seeping up?”

Brrr spoke with more urgency than he’d shown for weeks. From this new danger, a new capacity for governance. “Listen. If something comes over us—everyone—
listen carefully
. You must not ask them any questions if you don’t have something to tel them in return.”

“But Ozmists,” demanded Rain. “We don’t know about them.”

“They’re particles of ghosts, I think,” hurried the Lion, “ghosts who can’t congeal into anything like the individuals they once were. Fragments of rotted leaves in a puddle never coalesce into living leaves again. Listen, once I saw a friend lose his way in life by forgetting to give them news. You see, the Ozmists exist—it’s not living, but it is existing, I guess—for their future.
Their
future, which is our present. They hunger to learn what they couldn’t know in life—and they might answer a question if we chose to ask it. But our question can’t be about
now
, for they are dead and don’t know
now
.
Now
is what they’re hungry for. Our question must be about something in the past that they might have knowledge of—this is important, pay attention! Or you’l pay too steep a price.” They heard the tremor in his voice; it was their old Lion, forceful and worried for them, herding them together. They gathered into a circle, and even as he spoke a cloud of sparks seemed to shimmer with its own fulguration, an orgy of lightning bugs packed into a space the size of a stable.

“Hang on,” said Brrr. His voice sounded far away to them though he was right there; they were al right there.

They hung more than stood in a void not like the world. For a while they couldn’t see their feet or paws or hands, just their profiles, like dolmens rendered flat and brooding by soft weather.

Then the Ozmists greeted their audience, just as the Lion remembered it, in one voice, though indistinctly. The way a single head can have a thousand overlapping shadowy profiles if a thousand candles are placed about it.
Barter
, chuntered the Ozmists.

The companions waited for Brrr to answer for them. Would he have the courage? It took a moment. Or a week.

“I know about barter,” replied Brrr. “What do you want to know?”

Is Ozma returned to the throne of Oz?

“She is not,” said the Lion.

“Not as far as we know,” said Little Daffy. “I mean, we haven’t had news of the Emerald City”—she heard the Lion fake a cough and she amended her statement in time—“not the Emerald City, of course; but we know that Munchkinland is fighting strong to remain independent, holding the line at Haugaard’s Keep, holding the line at the Madeleines, keeping faith with the Glikkuns to the north, and sweeping the poison sand off their thresholds at the desert back door.”

The Ozmists seemed to take a few moments to absorb this considerable punch of news.
Where is Ozma?
they answered.

“It’s our turn to ask a question,” said Brrr. Rain tugged at his mane to quiet him, but he wouldn’t be silenced. “Where is Nor?”

“No, Brrr, don’t,” whispered Mr. Boss. “Don’t do that.” But the question had been asked.

The Lion waited as the lights spiraled, not unlike the waltz of corpuscles that sometimes trickle across the surface of the eye.

“Where is Nor?” asked Brrr again, more firmly stil. “I know how this works. I’ve been here before. We’ve answered your question. Now you answer ours. You can’t hold out on us.”
There is nothing of Nor here
, came the reply.