Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (86 page)

smaler, cannier, and more cunningly hued for camouflage. Were it alowed to breed, it could chew its way through our ‘Oz in endless leaf.’ For our own protection I have caged it in this box. It looks faintly related to the locust of the Grasslands or to the marsh fernhopper. It saws music from its legs, when it is happy. It isn’t happy now, but we wil require it to learn to be happy in a cage. And so wil you—” The youngest student, a lad who stil wore double padding against accidental leakage, picked up the wilow switch in the corner and cracked it upon the docent’s remonstrating finger. The other students rioted. They threw books out the window and chased the teacher into the henhouse, locking him inside. He sat most of the morning blubbering. Then the students ate al their lunch at once and left the wrappings to blow about in the schoolyard, and sang songs of loyalty to anarchy as they released the cricket from its cage.

Not too much should be read into al this. It is the sometime nature of children to be wild. And in wildness, as a traveler from another land has reminded us, is the salvation of the world.

In the coolness of the evening—that evening or the next, maybe—Rain came around enough to find—she must be halucinating—that her face was shaded from the setting sun by an umbrela.

“Very nice,” she said, admiring her psychosis.

“I’d hoped you appreciated it,” said a familiar voice. Iskinaary peered out from behind the upturned bowl of the fabric.

“Are
you
the angel of death? Goodness, you scared me enough in life, you’re not going to accompany me across the divide, are you?”

“Very funny. Have a cracker.” With his bil he secured a hard round biscuit from a little satchel slung over his neck. “Don’t worry, it’s not one of Little Daffy’s Curious Cupcakes.”

“I should be glad for one of those right about now. What are you doing here?”

“I’ve been folowing behind you for the better part of a year. Your father sent me to look for you when you didn’t come back after that hard winter in the grasslands, and I heard you’d continued on. I’ve been waiting out of sight, a few miles back, for several months. Not wanting to be presumptuous.”

“Oh, a little presumption is welcome now and then.”

“You’re dehydrated. Let me take that shel and fly to find some freshwater somewhere.”

“There’s no water here.”

“You don’t know where to look.”

Iskinaary, if it was realy he and not some irritating mirage, alowed himself to be fixed with the shel in a kind of sling, and went off for a while. When he came back, the basin of the shel slopped over with freshwater. Rain drank so quickly that she vomited most of it back up again. He didn’t mind. He got her more, and she kept the second portion down more neatly.

In the morning, or the morning after that, she felt better again. “You carried that umbrela al the way from Nether How?”

“I used it too, on certain nights. My feathers are thinning and the drainage isn’t what it used to be.” Yes, Iskinaary was an old Goose.

“You never liked me,” she said.

“I don’t like you now. But I am your father’s familiar, so let’s put personal feelings aside. We have a ways to go, I’l warrant.”

“I don’t know how far I’m going to get.”

“I don’t know either.” He smiled at her or winced, it was hard to tel the difference in any Goose, and particularly in Iskinaary. “But I think we are not very far from the edge.”

“The edge,” she said.

“Where you are going.”

“You don’t know where I am going.”

“Not ultimately.”

They considered this stalemate a while, and then Iskinaary relented. “Your father wasn’t much of a witch, was he?”

“He wasn’t much of a father either.”

“But he was pretty good as a Bird, when he flew with Kynot and the Conference. He learned a little bit. He didn’t learn enough.” She waited.

“The Birds have always known,” said Iskinaary. “At least, some have. But Birds, and birds, keep to themselves usualy. They flock with their kind. It takes the rare spirit to convince them to flock with those unlike them. Your father conducted one such campaign, in those dark days when the dragons first threatened Oz, threatened the skies for al the Birds, and the earth for al crawling creatures. Lir flew with us on his broom, as you fly now. He might have learned more from us, but he was young, and Birds, wel, they don’t volunteer much. It’s not in their nature. They are neutral, and possessed of a certain appealing reticence.”

“Some of them,” admitted Rain. “Not you.”

“So,” Iskinaary continued, “we’ve known. We have always known, or anyway we’ve heard rumors. We could have told you what we’d heard. I could have told you. Humans are so blind, their eyes on the ground, themselves always at the center. Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone’s horizon sweeps someone else’s. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.”

“Is everything al right back there in Oz?”

“I’ve not folowed along al these months to gossip.” He seemed angry. “I’m trying to tel you to keep going.”

“Wel, al right then. But if I’m right, I go alone.”

“You make the rules for the ground. I’l make the rules for the air.”

She launched herself and didn’t look behind to see if he was folowing. She knew he was, the roled-up umbrela in his claws. It would be kinder if she were to carry it, but she wasn’t ready to be kind.

That night, among scratchy grass, she slept and dreamed of Tip. She didn’t know if it was Tip or Ozma, realy; it was that kind of a dream that made her furious with need and regret and hope al at once. She awoke in the dark, clammy in a cold sweat even though it would be a warm day, she could tel. A sort of fog, as from Restwater, hung over the sedge.

She said to herself, Did my father send Iskinaary after me because a message had arrived at last?

But she wouldn’t ask the Goose for fear of the answer, either way it might be spoken. She wasn’t ready to know.

She found a place to squat, and after that she broke her fast with Iskinaary. More dry biscuits. Delicious. The wind, the world of shadows. The taunting stars strung on their invisible threads across the glowing velvet black. They didn’t speak—not girl, not Goose, not stars.

Near dawn, she strode through the grass to the top of the near slope, to see if the air would clear, if she could catch a glimpse of the next stretch.

Beyond the slope, at bluff’s edge, the ground dropped away in a returning curve, a bevel carved out by a stronger breeze. The air felt stronger, brusquer, colder, more filed with tang, almost a strange kind of vinegar in the wind.

She kept going, down that slope and up the curve of the next. The wind possessed bluster and noise she’d never heard at ground level before. Ever.

The fog had oriented itself into a composite of colored scarves through which the sun from behind her was beginning to seethe, gilding the unnatural hils.

They weren’t hils of earth.

The world’s edge was water; water as far as the eye could see; water from the scaloped strand out to the horizon. There was no end to it. The noise wasn’t the sound of wind, after al, but of moving water that made endless avalanche against the sand, punching and puling back. Foundries of spume and spit, and salt stinging her eyes. Thrashes of weight from side to side, streaked lateraly with zinc; mettanite; emerald; lamb’s wool; turquoise. The great weeping rim of the world.

She didn’t wait for the Goose. She slung her leg over the broom and launched at once. A new technique for flying would be needed against this force. Later in the day, if she lasted, she might glance back and find that the Goose had anticipated her departure and was steadily keeping pace a mile or more behind. She trusted that this would be true.

She would make no plan but this: to move out into the world as a Bird might, and to perch on the edge of everything that could be known. She would circle herself with water below and with sky above. She would wait until there was no stink of Oz, no breath of it, no sight of it on any horizon no matter how high she climbed. And then she would let go of the book, let it plunge into the mythical sea.

Live life without grasping for the magic of it.

Turn back, and find out what that was like; or turn forward, and learn something new.

A mile above anything known, the Girl balanced on the wind’s forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the sea itself, flung up by the turbulent air and sent wheeling away.

FINIS

About that country there’s not much left to say.

Blue sun, far off, a watery vein

in the cloud belt. The solid earth itself

unremarkable: familiar ruins

littered with standing stones our people

had lost the ability to decipher.

How deeply had we slept? Beneath the jellyfish

umbels of evergreens, each one a dream,

and the effervescent stars, strange currents

tugged at our thoughts like tapestries

unraveling into war. All spring

the nightingale perched on the green volcano’s lip.

The rats had abandoned the temples.

My mind was a voyage hungering to happen.

—Todd Hearon, “Atlantis”

… we must learn to live a secondary life in an unmarked world.

—Ron MacLean, “Duck Variations”

Acknowledgments

Thank you, one and al, to the many friends and coleagues who helped one way or the other in the work of getting
Out of Oz
out on paper.

—Douglas Smith, artist, for the splendid jacket and case, section art, and maps

—David Groff, Betty Levin, Andy Newman, for their close reading and helpful remarks

—Wiliam Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates, for the same

—Cassie Jones, Liate Stehlik, Lynn Grady, and other fine people at HarperColins: Rich Aquan, Ben Bruton, Jessica Deputato, Tavia Kowalchuk, Shawn Nichols, Lisa Stokes, Nyamekye Waliyaya, Chelsey Emmelhainz, and Lorie Young

—the producers and creators and performers of
Wicked
the musical, at home and around the world, whose good cheer has become a constant background melody in my life

—Scott Glorioso, Lori Shely, and Elizabeth Wiliams in the GM office, for managing crises from technological to overnight posting to accounting, but perhaps especialy to Emily Prabhaker, for helping me compose an index and synopsis to the first three books of
The Wicked Years
, which was an invaluable map and guide as I drove the complicated story to its complicated conclusion

—Todd Hearon and Ron MacLean, for permission to quote from their work at the novel’s close

—Andy and the next generation of Maguire Newmans, for al the life that cannot be found in the pages of novels

Coda

Before you close the cover of the present volume, and alow the writer to sink back into its pages, living both through and beside his characters, let’s grab a last look from the promontory. The next eyes to glance over our horizon wil see something else. Something new, prompting a separate issue to propose and explore.

Oz before sunrise. The ancient predawn light makes of the earth below a mystery, and of al those anonymous lives more mysteries stil. The tired stars winking out, the smear of cloud dividing the midnight from pale marigold dawn. The sheet of the heavens holds the stage a moment longer, eclipsing earthbound dramas of tedium, resurrection, and despair; of individual aspiration and sacrifice; of national effort and disgrace. A welcome amnesia, our capacity to sleep, to be lost in the dark. Today wil shine its spotlights to shame and to honor us soon enough. But al in good time, my pretty. We can wait.

Oz at sunrise. What one makes out, from any height, are the outlines. The steel-cut peaks of the Great Kels, the pudding hils of the Madeleines. The textured outcroppings of Shiz, Bright Lettins, the Emerald City. Ignore the few pixilated dots of gold in the black (early risers—those with ailing relatives, or scholars late at their books, nothing more than that). We see little of human industry and ambition to chart at this hour. This is a roughed-out landscape only coming into life. A map done in smudged pencil, a first draft. Much to be filed in when light arrives. But thank you, Mr. Baum, for leaving the map where I could find it.