Out of Oz

by Gregory Maguire

  Rain had decided to teach Scarly to read. They worked for almost an hour in the lamplight. From a classroom Scarly had pinched a slate and a slice of chalk, and Rain formed letters first while the maid copied them below. “Put more of a foot on that L or it will be mistaken for an I.”

  Scarly labored with her tongue in the corner of her mouth. She was tired enough when she arrived and she could rarely work for long, but she came back every second or third night. Since there was no extra coal for the stove in Rain’s chamber, they sat huddled under a single coverlet like a giant slug with two heads. Tay liked to bask in the lamplight and bat at the scratching chalk the way a cat might.

  One evening Scarly yawned and said, “I en’t the strength to do any more nasty vowels. Let’s just sit here and keep cozy for a moment till I get ready to run back through the cold to my room.” It was midwinter now, and the schoolyard between the annex and Founder’s Hall was hip deep in snow. “Tell me about your home.”

  Rain liked Scarly as well as she imagined she could ever like anyone, but she still wanted to hew to the instructions that her aunt and her parents had given her. Avoid making idle conversation that might endanger anyone. Rain didn’t believe she knew how to tell stories, anyway, and neither did she want to lie. “I’m good at forgetting all that,” she said, which was truthful enough. “Tell me about yours instead. Have you got two parents?”

  “Sure enough, man and wife, live in a hamlet that en’t got no name. A half hour on foot from Brox Hall, on the train line.”

  “How did you get all the way here?”

  “They had nine other mouths to feed, din’t they, so since my mouth was less sassy than some, they figured to put me to work in the city.”

  “You have nine brothers and sisters?” Rain almost saw shooting stars.

  “No, six of ’em, plus Grandmaw, that gormless old witch, and the goat and the milk-cow. The chickens don’t count as they feed themselves with grubs and such.”

  Rain wasn’t sure how to frame the next question. “Do you miss them much?”

  “I see ’em once a year, don’t I?” She tightened her lips and bobbed her chin in affirmation. “That’s more than my maties belowstairs, most of ’em, and also Cook, who has three sons in the army and thinks they must all be dead as dinner.”

  “Are they older or younger, your brothers and sisters?”

  “Oh, all sorts. How about you?”

  “I have Tay,” said Rain.

  “Anyone coming to see you on Visitation Day?”

  She caught herself from saying my aunt. “I don’t know. I haven’t had any”—what was the word?—“correspondence.”

  “I’m sure your maw will come. They all do. The girls expect it.”

  “The girls are all sleeping in warm dormitories too.”

  “I’m warm enough.” They giggled over nothing. Tay curled tighter, not so much a coil of greenish otter but a congealed heap of fur. Tay hadn’t cared for the winter in the Five Lakes and liked it even less in Shiz. All at once it perked up its ears, bowed points, and raised its head in a motion so fast they didn’t even see a blur.

  “It hears something,” whispered Rain.

  “What?”

  “The ghost!”

  They both tried to scare themselves more by making terrified faces, with huge eggy eyes showing white around the irises, with mouths dropped open. Then it stopped being fun and Scarly said, “I better go. You’ll be okay with the ghost on your own?”

  “I have Tay.”

  “Tay the Attack Otter.” Scarly got up and impulsively threw her arms around Rain from behind. “Really, you’ll be all right, Miss Rainary?”

  “Honestly, Scarly. You don’t believe in ghosts, remember?”

  The maid swore she didn’t believe in ghosts, but she left the annex in double time. Rain settled back in the blanket. It held in some of the maid’s warmth long enough for her to get to sleep. She didn’t dream of ghosts, though when she woke up once in the frosty moonlight she noticed that Tay was still sitting with an erect spine and a needle-sharp attentiveness. Probably a new family of mice, she thought.

  II.

  Visitation Day arrived at last. Since Rain had no callers, she helped Miss Ironish pour tea and squeeze lemons. “You’re a very good child, Miss Rainary,” said Miss Ironish during a lull. “Madame Shenshen speaks highly of you, and Madame Chortlebush seems to be warming up. Slowly.”

  “Madame Chortlebush is a fine lecturer.”

  “I do hope you aren’t becoming attached inappropriately.” Miss Ironish saw impending doom in every situation. “It’s not correct to focus your attentions upon a single individual, Miss Rainary. These little tendresses can begin to happen in a school setting, but they must be strictly nipped in the bud. Using the Secateurs of Personal Government. Do you remember my lecture on the imaginary Secateurs we each have in our employ?”

  Rain wasn’t paying much attention. “Do you have family to visit on Visitation Day, Miss Ironish?”

  “The impertinence, Miss Rainary! My brother, Proctor Gadfry Clapp, is all the family one needs.” She arranged the lace cuffs of her sleeves for the thousandth time. “I would like to abolish Visitation Day as a distraction, but I am afraid we would have a revolution on our hands. I’m sorry, of course, that you haven’t heard from your mother. I trust no harm has come to her.”

  Rain bobbed a slight curtsey. She had found that when she wasn’t sure what to say, a curtsey often smoothed over the silence. But today Miss Ironish said, “That’s common of you, Miss Rainary. A curtsey in this situation is what I would expect the parlor maid to drop. Don’t sell yourself short. Your mother may not have bothered to write or call, but still, you aren’t a member of the staff. You’re of finer stock than that. Despite your bullish awkwardness, good breeding will out. And if Madame Chortlebush and Madame Shenshen are right, you’ll be able to do solid academic work one day. So don’t pander.”

  “Yes, Miss Ironish.” Rain stifled the urge to curtsey five or six times in a row.

  At dinner Rain sat near Miss Mope, with her one-legged father in his narrow oiled beard, and Miss Igilvy, whose parents were so grizzled and birdlike their daughter must have been hatched from an egg. Above the chatter of schoolgirls, the talk was of the war.

  “Fleecing us with taxes. Draining us dry,” asserted Father Mope.

  “We defend all of Oz, and yet do the godless tribes of the Vinkus contribute anything in manpower or strategic thinking? I’m merely asking,” replied Father Igilvy.

  “You wouldn’t want strategic thinking from the Yunamata. They can’t think far enough to build their houses with stone walls!”

  The laughter was brisk and quickly over. “And yet we’re defending them, too,” said Mope. “And the Scrow, and I suppose those Arjiki clans in the Great Kells. They have more savvy than some of those other Winkies.”

  “Oh yes,” said ancient Mother Igilvy, patting her daughter on the head as if she were a loaf of bread warm from the oven. “I went out to the West once, you know, and met some Arjiki royalty.”

  “You never told me that, Mother,” chirped her equally ancient husband.

  “Of course I did.”

  “How divinely fascinating,” said Mope. “Did you write up your sentiments for the papers, or retail your anecdotes to Ladies’ Clubs?”

  “Indeed. And I remember quite well telling about one castle high in the mountains. It was the place where that Witch was brought down, do you remember?”

  Rain began to chew exceedingly quietly so as not to miss a syllable.

  “The Arjiki family who had lived there had long ago been slaughtered by the Wizard’s forces, I came to understand. The place—Kirami something, Kirami Ko, I think—was crawling with flying monkeys who did their best to put on a full cream tea. I’m afraid monkeys are shambolic by nature. We were taken all over the shabby place. It was built as a waterworks, you know.”

  “Miss Rainary’s surname is Ko,” said Miss Igilvy. “Pass the gravy bo
at?”

  “I never knew that,” said Miss Igilvy’s father to her mother. “A water-works. I never.”

  “Of course you did, you old phony. You sat in the front row at each and every presentation I gave.”

  “I was napping with my eyes open. Why a waterworks, so high in the mountain? Was the building put up on a river suitable for a waterwheel of some sort?”

  “No, nothing of the sort. Don’t you remember? I had bright illuminatums, surely you recall! I had painted them myself, on vellum from Plutney & Blood’s.”

  “When the house lights go low I tend to go low too.”

  “I was led to believe that a giant reservoir, a lake of sorts, might lurk underneath the mountain, deep down, and that the castle of Kirami Ko was originally intended as the housing for a great artesianal device. A screw of some sort that would sink down oh for yonks, and pull up water in the way screws can manage to do.”

  “That’s the hugest helping of nonsense I ever heard,” said Mope affably. “The Vinkus River that cascades from the heights carries all the water the Kells could possibly provide. And every drop debouches into Restwater. The notion of drilling for more water when Restwater just sits there—the Wizard or whatever Ozma initiated that plan couldn’t be so idiotic.”

  “Well, don’t rely on my memory,” said Mother Igilvy. “But perhaps it wasn’t the Wizard’s plan after all. Maybe the Arjiki tribe thought it all up so as to be self-sufficient from the Emerald City, just like those truncated Munchkinlanders.”

  “Is there any more gravy at that end?” asked Miss Igilvy.

  “I never understood how the Wicked Witch of the West was killed by a bucket of water, as the legend has it,” said Mope.

  “Oh, I’ve worked that out,” said Mother Igilvy. “I have concluded the bucket must have been filled to the brim with several gallons of Kellswater. It’s a drearily lifeless and poisonous liquor, you know. Everyone says so.”

  “But what would she be doing with a bucket of Kellswater at the ready?” asked Mope.

  “Dear husband, you eat any more popovers and gravy and you’ll rip a stitch. My good sir, the Witch obviously had stashed away a dousing of Kellswater as a prophylactic against an attacker. But it was used against her by that Doromeo.”

  “Dorothy,” said Miss Igilvy firmly.

  “Did you hear she has come back, and has been put on trial in Munchkinland? Condemned to death,” said Mope.

  “The Munchkinlanders are a cruel, cruel people,” said Mother Igilvy with satisfaction. “They deserve the pummeling we’re giving them.”

  “Perhaps not quite the pummeling we advertise,” said Mope in a quieter voice. “Miss Plumbago, what do you hear from your grandfather, that distinguished General Cherrystone?”

  Rain swiveled her head; she couldn’t help it. Miss Plumbago was General Cherrystone’s granddaughter? How—how enwreathed life could manage to be. But just then Proctor Clapp got up to address the diners, and Father Igilvy fell asleep before the popovers and gravy were even removed from the table.

  Rain knew they had been talking about Kiamo Ko, about her own grandmother, Elphaba Thropp. It made her feel dizzy. Hiding in plain sight. As soon as Proctor Clapp had finished, Rain excused herself, though no one noticed, and headed back to her room across the yard. The stables were filled with horses of the visitors, and out in the back street the ostlers and chauffeurs were having a smoke around a brazier and rubbing their hands to keep warm. She liked the sound of that commotion, she liked the smell of the horses. And the rising heat of their bodies warmed the annex right up to her room. She changed her clothes and took Tay in her arms and lay back on her bed, knowing she would not sleep easily tonight. Not with pictures in her head of some murdered Dorothy, some murdered grandmother, some castle she had never seen with a cellar shaped like a shaft and a giant screw plunging down, down, down, into the heart of the earth. And then she heard a noise as of someone coming through her wardrobe. It did not sound like a ghost, so she got up to see what it was.

  I2.

  In the pearl-blue gloom of midnight she couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy. But Tay was usually skittish and aggressive around boys, she’d noticed, and now it seemed only calm and alert, not hostile. “Miss bon Schirm?” ventured Rain, naming one of the taller girls. “Did your parents fail to come on Visitation Day too?”

  But it wasn’t Miss bon Schirm.

  “You scared me half to death. Come out of there.”

  A boy emerged. Three, four inches taller than Rain, though his hair was raked every which way, and maybe if it were properly combed he’d be closer to her height. The face was wary, urgent, perhaps clever—it was hard to tell in this light, and besides, Rain didn’t trust her estimations of people’s characters. Yet. She wondered, in fact, if she ever would. Perhaps now was a good time to start. Was he about to strike her?

  But there was Tay, attentive, curious, but hardly rearing to attack. A pretty good barometer.

  “What were you doing in there?”

  He held out the large shiny shell she had carried with her from nearly as far back as she could remember. “What is this?”

  “Mine.” She took it from him. His hands were shaking a little. “Did you come here to steal my things?”

  “No. Of course not. You haven’t got much.”

  “So I’m told. Are you going to hurt me?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You hid in my cupboard and were going to jump out.”

  “When I heard you coming up I hurried in there. I was waiting until you went to sleep, and then I was going to slip away. I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “But what were you doing here in the first place?”

  “Looking for something to eat.”

  Rain shrugged. “Nothing to eat here. Pretty obviously. Unless you like books.” She took a closer look. “Are you very hungry? Are you starving? You don’t look in the pink of health.”

  “I’m not stuffed and groaning, that’s for certain. My stomach rumbles like caves collapsing.”

  She bit her lip and thought she should probably feel his forehead, but she didn’t care for touching people. “Are you ill?”

  “Look, I’ll just go. I’m sorry for this rude surprise. I didn’t know anyone was living in this building.”

  She was putting it together as best she could. “But you were hiding from someone.”

  “Just putting the shell farther back on its shelf. For safety,” he said, reaching his hand. She didn’t give the shell back.

  “Oh, that’s thoughtful. Do you ever break into anyone’s room and just, oh, knit? Or nip into someone’s house and just polish the wainscoting? You aren’t making any sense.”

  “You’re uncommonly calm. I’m glad for that. If you had screamed I would have gotten in terrible trouble. I’ll leave now. If you don’t say a word about this I will be a little bit safer.”

  Tay inched forward and sniffed at the boy’s very wet boots, which were open at the toe and heel and, now Rain thought of it, smelled dreadful. Then Tay wreathed itself around the boy’s ankle for a moment and looked up at Rain. She made herself do the improbable and reached out and put her palm to his forehead.

  “Am I hot?”

  She considered the answer to that, but while she had known how to be quiet her whole life, she had never quite learned how to lie. “I don’t know. I never felt someone’s forehead before.”

  “Feeling your own doesn’t work. You can’t feel yourself sick.”

  “Is that true?” She tried it. She just felt like herself. But what did herself feel like? She had never thought to ask.

  “Do you know what yourself feels like?” she asked him.

  “Oh, now that’s the question,” he replied, and buckled at the knees.

  “I didn’t intend such a powerful question,” she commented. Then she realized he had passed out on the coverlet that she and Scarly sometimes huddled under.

  She didn’t know what to do, so she did nothing. S
he wasn’t allowed to leave her room after ninth bell, not until morning bell except to visit the privy. And there was nothing useful in the privy.

  She remembered that the stables were full of guest horses. She told Tay to stay put while she hustled into a waist-length wool coat and hurried down both flights of stairs. The horses in their stalls nickered and wheezed, and shuffled at the sound of her, and she was glad for their noise and warmth. Various coachmen still lingered, smoking cheap tobacco rolled in old newsprint, and husbanding pints of ale that Proctor Clapp had sneaked out to them when his sister wasn’t looking. The ale had made the men jolly. They chattered on as Rain went quickly through the few satchels that had been lobbed into the shadows just inside the stable doors.

  “My lady, she’s a right dab of codswallop, she is. She pays me but a penny farthing for the trip from Plaid Acres to Shiz, and then she’s late for the school supper because she’s got to stop and buy new gowns in that fancified silk depot over to Pennikin Lane!”

  A small quarter of cheese. Better than nothing.

  “My lady’s got yours beat in the mud with a beetroot up her arse. Mine’s so cheap she thinks I don’t merit the privacy of a loo with a closed door, so she stops before any town center at the last possible shrine to Lurlina and makes me take a dump behind it! Says it saves her a fee and helps stamp out paganism at the same time.”

  Oooh, a hunk of bread. Pretty hard, but maybe if she held it over her candle?

  “The old gov’nor en’t so bad. He’s a secret royalist, though. He prays for the Emperor every night like he’s told to do—he prays that the Emperor passes away peaceful in his sleep, and that some miracle return the Ozma line to the throne. He was born under an Ozma and he wants to die under one, he says. I tells him to his face, he’s gonna die under a lake narwhal, the missus keep putting on the pounds like she’s doing.”

  “You don’t say that, you buggery liar!”

  “I says it in my heart, like a prayer.”

  A lot of laughter outside. In the last satchel, a trove—a mince pie, almost fresh by the smell of it, and two carrots and an apple, probably for the horse, and a small porcelain flagon of something liquid. She nicked it all, neat as Handy Mandy, and a rather nicely woven pink blanket that was thrown over a mare, and she scurried up the stairs. No one heard her. One of the ostlers was saying, “Give over some of that Baum’s Liquid Hoof Dressing, my pretty piebald is sorer than sandpaper on a sow’s behind.”