Out of Oz

by Gregory Maguire

  “We have no extradition treaties, so you’re safe here as far as that goes,” said Nipp. “Not that you deserve to be harbored, necessarily.”

  The Lion turned to Dorothy. They were only six feet apart now. She was too mature to throw her arms around him. Indeed, she looked a little frightened. “Up until now I had hoped this might all be a dream,” she said. “But you are just like yourself, and yet different than you were. Put on a little weight? I think you have.”

  “You’re a sight for sore eyes yourself,” he told her.

  “Save your chatter for after hours,” advised the magistrate. “Anyone else?”

  Brrr oughtn’t to have been surprised to see Little Daffy approach the bench. She had murmured something once about having seen Dorothy. “I suppose I have an obligation to make myself known to you. I am called Little Daffy. My name originally was Daffodil Sully, but I was known for some years as Sister Apothecaire, a unionist maunt housed at the Cloister of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows, in the southern corner of Gillikin.”

  “And how do you know the accused?” asked the magistrate.

  Little Daffy looked sideways at Dorothy Gale. “I can’t say I know her. I’m merely answering your call to identify myself as someone who has crossed paths with her before. I was present in Center Munch on the day when Dorothy first arrived in Oz. The day that her house tumbled out of the sky and killed Nessarose.”

  The mumble in the room grew louder. It was one thing to have an Animal or an illegal immigrant questioned by a magistrate. But a Munchkinlander present at the death of Nessarose Thropp! Brrr wasn’t sure if the susurrus suggested admiration, disbelief, or alarm. Little Daffy gave a curt nod to Dorothy and said, “When it comes time to discuss what happened that day, I’ll put my bootblack on my brogans, same as anyone else.”

  Nipp sent them back to their seats but ordered their continued attendance through the duration of the trial. They’d be called to testify in time. Probably not today, he suspected. There were other matters to get through first.

  The rest of the afternoon was spent in a recital of previous cases that had been heard in Bright Lettins. Dame Fegg had enjoyed quite a career of prosecution. Each description of her most famous wins was met with bursts of applause. The matters at hand involved hexed chickens, tax evasion, one or two cases of lechery. Interesting enough, but they didn’t seem pertinent to the task of trying Dorothy for murder. Temper Bailey, on the other hand, had never won a case.

  After catching Little Daffy’s eye and signaling that he should be roused if something interesting began to happen, the Lion put his head on his paws and slept. He didn’t waken until the magistrate concluded proceedings for the day with a loud bang of the gavel. “You didn’t miss anything. The good stuff starts tomorrow,” said Little Daffy.

  “Oh, Brrr,” said Dorothy over her shoulder, as she was prodded toward the trapdoor by the Chimpanzees. “It makes such a difference to me that you would come to my defense.”

  “If you knew my record of accomplishments in the years since I last saw you,” said the Lion, “you wouldn’t feel so cheery. But I’ll do what I can, Dorothy. I never understood you for a single moment, but in the choice between wishing you ill and wishing you well, I wish you well.”

  “I should think so,” said Dorothy, and she opened her mouth as if to say more, but the Chimpanzees slammed down the trapdoor, narrowly missing the crown of her head.

  6.

  By the time Brrr and Little Daffy arrived the next morning, the room was full to bursting. After Lord Nipp entered and called Dorothy from the musty holding pen below, Dame Fegg minced forward and said, “Since we’ve concluded the opening statements, may I begin to question the witness, Your Honor?”

  “One moment,” said Lord Nipp. He fished out a paper from beneath his robes. “Dorothy Gale, you claim to be sixteen years old, and you certainly look and sound like a child of that age, if rather big by local standards. Can you tell us how old you were when you first arrived in Oz and murdered Nessarose Thropp?”

  “I take exception to that definition of my actions,” said Dorothy, “but letting that go for a moment, I will tell you: it was 1900 when the twister came through our parts. I was ten years old.”

  “And you say you are sixteen now. That’s six years older. Yet by my figuring, and believe me I have counted it frontward and backward since I left here yesterday, it is about eighteen years since you spent a few months in Oz.”

  The girl looked flummoxed. She counted on her fingers for a moment. “I didn’t go far in school. Eventually the teacher said I was too fanciful and sent me back to the farm. But here, I can do these sums…”

  “Nessarose Thropp and her sister Elphaba have been dead for eighteen years,” said Nipp sternly, as if this were proof enough of Dorothy’s guilt.

  “But how odd. How irregular! The last time I was in Oz I was ten years old. Big for my age, but even so. And this time around I am sixteen. That is six years older, you’re right about that. And you tell me that those witch sisters have both been gone for about eighteen years? How can this be?”

  “Maybe time moves slower in Kansas,” said the magistrate.

  “Time crawls in Kansas. But some say Kansas is a state of mind.” She sat up and pushed her bosom forward as if she’d just remembered she wasn’t a little girl anymore. “It’s uncanny. Perhaps I’ve become mentally unfit.”

  Dame Fegg delivered a moue in the direction of the jurors to make sure they caught Dorothy’s admission.

  The accused brightened up. “We can work this out. I just need to know how you count time in Oz. What year did I first arrive?”

  The court waited for her to explain. A fly drove itself insanely around an upper windowpane.

  “You arrived the year that you arrived,” said Lord Nipp evenly, patiently, the way a parent responds because to some child’s question of why?

  “Yes. But what was the year named? I mean, at home I was born in 1890 and I was ten years old when the cyclone came and drove the farmhouse from Kansas to Oz, so that was 1900. Was it the year 1900 in Oz? The year I made my first visit? And so what is this year called? I mean, if anything ought to be universal, time ought to be.”

  The magistrate said, “I’m not here to be your tutor, Miss Gale. Nonetheless, I’ll tell you that you seem to be relying on a system of naming years that is unfamiliar to us. In Oz we have no universal method of notching time or assigning arbitrary numbers to year-spans. I’m told that the Quadlings live quite comfortably without any system at all, since the climate there more or less precludes seasonal variation. The Gillikinese and the Emerald City refer to the passage of time in terms of the reigns of the various Ozmas or, since the Wizard first arrived, the various reigns of the Throne Ministers. The first, the seventh, the twelfth year of the Emperor Shell’s reign, and so on. Here in Munchkinland the length and disposition of our months vary according to cycles of the moon. In years of a jackal moon, for instance, we skip the month of Masque, out of some old superstition no one remembers. In years when the sun casts no shadow on Seeding Day, we add seven weeks of agricultural season called the Corn Time. If it rains too much in the spring we just skip over Guestlight. So, our years being irregularly shaped, they don’t line up for easy counting. No one tries to do it.”

  “Besides,” added Little Daffy, speaking from the sidelines, “if I might add a word, arithmetic has its own cultural moods. In the mauntery, for instance, any span of years more than six we counted as a decade. It doesn’t always mean ten years. It just meant ‘looks about like ten years, sooner or later.’ ”

  “To say nothing of the fact,” added Brrr, as long as this was turning into a colloquy, “that when nothing seems to be happening, you can’t tell if time is stuck a little. Six years might go by—call it a decade or call it the blink of an eye—but until something else happens to make you pay attention, it doesn’t matter what you call it. If there’s no reason to notch the memory, why waste time counting dead time?”

&nb
sp; The magistrate said, “I didn’t ask for opinions from the floor.”

  Dorothy looked withered and testy. “So I say I was here six years ago, and now I’m sixteen. You say it was about eighteen years ago, depending on the moon, the province, and whether anyone remembered to notice that time was passing. According to you I could be twenty-eight. In Kansas that’s downright grandmotherly.”

  Clearing his throat, Temper Bailey ventured his first remark. “Time is fascinating, sure, but why are we spending time on this?”

  “If I’m twenty-eight,” said Dorothy, “then I’ve reached my majority and I can serve as my own attorney. I want to call for a recess. I’m going out to try my first whiskey smash. Uncle Henry says they’re great. Anyone want to join me?” She held out a forearm to the Owl so he might perch there.

  “It’s hardly past breakfast, and the court hasn’t adjourned for the day,” said Nipp. “Not to mention that you are under arrest.”

  “Oh, right.” Still, Dorothy’s shoulders squared a little straighter on her spine.

  “I shall begin,” said Dame Fegg, and Nipp nodded his assent. “I would like to start with a question about your life of crime prior to your first arrival in Oz, Dorothy Gale.”

  “Oh, do call me Dorothy,” said the defendant. “Everyone does.”

  “In your home territory, Dorothy Gale, is killing witches something one might have trained for in grammar school? Or taken up as an extracurricular hobby?”

  “Goodness, Dame Fegg—is that how I should address you?—they didn’t teach much in grammar school. Some simple sums. Our letters and how to form them on a slate. A little Virgil. The Christian principles of government. Also how to share. In any case, there are no witches in Kansas, nor as far as I could tell in San Francisco either, though frankly I don’t believe I got to the bottom of what was going on there. It sure wasn’t like Kansas, though there felt like some kind of magic at work. In any case, I wouldn’t have killed anyone, witches or no. Uncle Henry says we’re makeshift Quakers. We don’t believe in violence except of course at hog-killing time, because as the waiter said to me in the San Francisco hotel, there is nothing like a nice hot sausage slapped between warm buns first thing in the morning.” The Sow in the second row turned grey and put her hooves over the ears of her littlest Piglet. “He was ’tremely agreeable you know but I do believe he wasn’t my type. Uncle Henry said I didn’t have a type as far as he knew and in any case by the looks of things I wasn’t going to find a fellow for myself, suitable or otherwise, in San Francisco.”

  Dame Fegg had stopped as if calcified at Dorothy’s reply. Her mouth opened once or twice and when she made a note her hand was trembling. “Dorothy Gale, I must remind you to answer only the question I ask. Otherwise we could be here for a year. However we count it.”

  “Oh, yes, Dame Fegg. Answer only the question. That’s what my teacher in Kansas used to say. That’s why I had to take my lessons sitting on a bench outside the school building. I could lean my books and my slate on the windowsill. If I started talking too much, the teacher would come over to the sill and close the window. So if I couldn’t hear him I just would look around at Kansas, which is maybe what first gave me a yen to travel. I mean you’d have to stand on your head to make Kansas novel, and even that only works for a while. Have you ever traveled, Dame Fegg?”

  “Not to Kanziz,” said the prosecutor, in a voice that made it into a kind of joke, as if she were saying haven’t gone out of my mind—yet. The crowd tittered, not knowing if that was allowed, but Nipp hid his mouth behind his hand too, so maybe it was all right.

  “I’d like to be the first to invite you to visit,” said Dorothy. “I would have to be your chaperone, of course, because a little woman like yourself might be considered a child, and then you couldn’t get a whiskey smash either. Not that you could get one in Kansas under any circumstances. It’s a dry state. Dry, dry, dry.”

  Dame Fegg pounced on those words as if Dorothy were casting a spell. “When you first came from Kanziz, Dorothy Gale, we were recovering from a drought that had plagued most of Oz for as long as we could remember. In a great wind you arrive, you with your suspicious name of Gale, which suggests windstorms and rain. You succeed in a matter of months in doing away with both of the Thropp sisters, who with their magic capacities might have further united and strengthened Munchkinland. In their absence, however determined our own population to govern itself, Munchkinland has not thrived. The annual rainfall has improved only slightly, and the armies of Loyal Oz have invaded our fair province and requisitioned Oz’s largest basin of potable water, the lake called Restwater. You have a great deal to answer for.”

  “Well, let me start by saying we know drought in Kansas, believe me. I—”

  “You may start by being quiet,” said Nipp. “Dame Fegg, at the moment please confine your questions to the matter of the murders. We may not number our years in Oz as they do in this place called Kanziz, but we number our days as precious, and we don’t want to be here until our grandchildren have grandchildren. And you, missy, keep your answers short and to the point. You are brought up on most serious charges indeed.”

  “Got it,” said Dorothy.

  “Briefly, I beg you, briefly,” said Dame Fegg, “describe your arrival in Center Munch for us, however many years ago we pretend it was or wasn’t. I would like you to answer for us particularly how you knew that Nessarose, the Eminent Thropp and governor of Munchkinland, would be present that day, and how you organized an assassination of such cunning and precision, and also when and how you decided to proceed with your march on the Emerald City.”

  Chastised and trying to please, Dorothy recounted what she could of her first arrival in Oz, either six or eighteen years ago. Off to the side, Brrr remembered quite a bit of what she’d told him, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman. As far as he recalled she’d gotten the facts of her alibi down straight, if alibi it was. In the safety of her family’s farmhouse, the child Dorothy had taken refuge from a storm. Through some sort of catastrophe of nature, aided perhaps by a deep magic, the house had been lifted into the air, whirled through dark agency across the uncrossable sands that surround Oz, and deposited in Center Munch. Right on top of Nessarose Thropp. Apparently Dorothy hadn’t been taught about Oz in her schooling on national geographics, though perhaps that was part of the curriculum she missed by being exiled to the bench outside the closed window. She had never been able to ask about Oz even after she returned to Kansas because the teacher, frightened out of his mind by the twister coming so near, had taken off for Chicago.

  “Taken off for Shiz?” asked Dame Fegg, scratching her ear.

  “Chicago,” said Dorothy, but trying not to run on at the mouth she just mimed a cityscape with huge buildings. “Chi-caaaaa-go.”

  Dorothy continued her narrative. It was a grisly tale. After landing, she’d learned that a good part of the town of Center Munch and outliers had gathered that morning for some sort of religious festival. Young students had been receiving prizes. Experiencing a sudden darkness, they all dove into the shrubbery and nearby homes. They heard a weird whistling followed by a shattering crash at which precise moment all their eyes were closed in terror. When they emerged from hiding, they found that a house had stove in the grandstand erected for the occasion. Dorothy stood in the center of the town square, not far from the start of the Yellow Brick Road. It took the astounded citizens of Center Munch a few moments to realize that Nessarose Thropp, alone of them, had refused to move an inch, even under the signs of the imminent attack.

  “How like her,” murmured Dame Fegg. “Proof of her character.” Though Brrr had remembered it being said that her standing her ground had been proof of her noxious superiority. Once she had learned to stand on her own two feet, that is.

  “At any rate,” continued Dorothy, “you may call it murder now, but at the time no one clapped me in chains. They celebrated their release from a wicked fiend. Or that’s how they said it to me. The Wicked Witch of the East
had claimed for herself all powers of deciding right and wrong.” Dorothy straightened up. “I was hailed as a liberator, and soon Glinda arrived to set me on the road to the Emerald City to accept my reward.”

  “Maybe she intended you to be imprisoned there, in Southstairs,” said Dame Fegg. “Getting a dangerous criminal out of commission is the first duty of a public figure.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” said Dorothy. “There was singing and dancing, and someone brought out sweet bricks of bread spread with a hideous sticky cream jam of some sort. I had never meant to kill a witch—I hadn’t even known witches existed, except in storybooks, and not the kind of storybooks we were allowed to read in Kansas, believe me. It was all so sudden, you see.”

  “There are a great many holes in your testimony,” said Dame Fegg. “For your house to crash exactly upon the place our Eminent Thropp stood, killing her and her alone—it beggars credulity. It smacks of a conspiracy in high places. I suspect someone in the Emerald City was involved.”

  “When I landed, they didn’t call it an impossible coincidence,” said Dorothy in about as cold a voice as Brrr had ever heard her use. “They called it a miracle.”

  “I put it to the judge and the jury that with malice aforethought the defendant conspired to alight in a most deadly manner,” said Dame Fegg. “She wreaks havoc wherever she goes, both last time and this. The poor cow.” Though it was unclear whether she meant Dorothy or the Glikkun milk cow she squashed upon arrival this time.

  Brrr saw Little Daffy’s arm waving right in front of his nose. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I add a word?” She popped out of her chair and approached the magistrate’s desk.

  “If it’s pertinent, go ahead,” said Nipp.