Now, hunched beneath the doorway of a shuttered butchery in the Emerald City, with Dorothy so newly met, and just as quickly vanished, he remembered the incident in the barn at Kiamo Ko. There is no resolving a good mess, he thought. Every breath one takes is a waking up into disjointedness, over and over.
He rocked hard enough to build plum-colored bruises on his shoulders. They hurt when he prodded them, and he prodded them to make them hurt.
He had nowhere to go, nothing to do. By day and night he meandered like the other bits of human trash that drifted up and down the boulevards. Filching from merchants, begging for pennies, relieving themselves in public without concern for decency or hygiene.
Nightly he returned to the café, in case his sense of dread had been for naught, and Dorothy might still make good on her promise and come back for him, at least to say good-bye. A lucky thing, too, for on the fifth day Liir was turning over newspapers looking for scrag-ends of butter pastry when he was tapped on the shoulder. He turned, half expecting that the café owner had summoned the police as he’d been threatening. Instead, Liir found the Scarecrow.
“You’re still here,” said the Scarecrow. “Somehow, I thought you would be.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s gone, you know that.” The Scarecrow sighed. “You knew she would go. She was a Visitor, not of our kind; that kind can’t stay, you know.”
“How do you know? Maybe you just need to invite them.”
The Scarecrow affected a superior attitude, and that was his only answer. “A lot is going to change in a very short time,” he said. “I hope it’s for the best, but it could get ugly in the interim. I thought it smartest to let you know. If I were you I would get out of town.”
“No one wants me,” said Liir, scoffing. “No one cares to come looking for me! No one knows who I am, not even myself. Do you mean that because someone tittered that the Witch was my mother, I’m in danger?”
“I don’t mean that,” said the Scarecrow. “I don’t know if anyone here knows or cares whether the Witch had children, or who they might be. I just mean there’s talk of a cleanup of this neighborhood.” He straightened up—he’d been limping, an odd thing for a Scarecrow—and cast his clumsy gloved hand down Dirt Boulevard, where the denizens of the evening were in their cups. A small crowd had gathered around a couple of half-naked teens making dirty right there on the ground. The tatterdemalions were pelting them with bits of food and egging them on. Elsewhere, bottles emptied of their beer smashed on paving stones. A baby cried piteously.
“What is happening?” said Liir.
“The Wizard has left, and Dorothy is gone, and Lady Glinda Chuffrey, née Arduenna of the Uplands, has been importuned to supervise a government until something more permanent can be arranged.”
“Glinda! I heard of her. The Witch used to talk about her sometimes. Well, she’ll do some good, won’t she?”
“Doing good, cleaning house, takes a mighty strong broom,” said the Scarecrow. “Speaking of which…”
The Scarecrow looked this way and that. The kids on the ground, wheezing and humping in their throes of lust, had secured the crowd’s full attention. The Scarecrow reached into his waistband and, hand over hand, drew out a stake. No, a pole—the handle of the broom. The Witch’s broom. Aha. Hence the limp.
He gave it to Liir. “No one wanted it,” he said. “No one needed it for anything. It served its purpose and was going to be thrown out.”
Liir accepted it with resignation; one more thing to carry back to the home he no longer had. “What do you mean, things are going to get ugly? Seems to me they’re pretty ugly around here already.”
“Well, I mean, for the ceremony of Glinda’s elevation, they’ll have to relocate the urban poor. For one thing. Glinda’s quite tidy and likes things just so.”
“You seem to know a lot all of a sudden. The brains are working?”
“There’s talk that Lady Glinda will eventually yield, and put a wise Scarecrow on the throne,” the Scarecrow said, pride—or derision—making his voice sound odd. “After she cleans up the Wizard’s affairs. And there are those who think that the charmed child Ozma will be located in some cave almost at once, now that the Wizard’s gone. Sounds cynical and desperate to me, but what do I know of government? I’ve had more access to information the last few days than the rest of my life put together.”
“A wise Scarecrow on the throne? You?” said Liir, incredulous. “Sorry, I don’t mean to imply—”
“I,” said the Scarecrow, “or someone like me. Frankly, to human beings, all Scarecrows look the same, which is odd, since we seem to be much more individual than humans. But we’re made in their image and likeness, so all they see in us is themselves, and one mirror is as good as another, I guess.”
“Do you want to be king? Now that you’re so smart?”
“Now that I’m so smart, I know enough not to let on what I want,” said the Scarecrow. “We should move away from here, you know.”
Liir roped the heavy cape around his arms and took the scorched broom. “Any ideas?”
“Just—away. This is all so unseemly.” The Scarecrow indicated the throng. “You’re very young for all this.”
“You’re younger than I,” said Liir.
“I was born old,” said the Scarecrow. “That’s how I was made.”
“I don’t know how I was made,” said the boy. “That’s part of my problem.”
They crossed a small canal into a quieter street and came to rest on a fundament to which ranks of small private barges and blunt-boats were tied up for the night. The smoke of cooking fires, the smell of boiled beans and potato stew hung in the air.
“I miss Dorothy,” he said.
The Scarecrow replied, “It’s the Witch you miss, isn’t it?”
“I hated her too much to miss her.”
“That’s what you think.”
“You think your own thoughts, and leave me mine.” He was outraged at the presumption. “What did you know of the Witch? Auntie Witch? Elphaba Thropp? She was my…she was my witch!”
The Scarecrow paid no attention. “It’s starting, listen,” he said. He held up his hand. The sounds from Dirt Boulevard had altered; a percussion of horses’ hoofs, hundreds of them, came thrumming forward, a scatter of shouts turning into screams. “I waited too long,” the Scarecrow said. He bundled Liir onto the nearest canal boat. A bearded old coot with a sawed-off hand turned and raised a hot skillet at the Scarecrow, but the Scarecrow deflected it with his gloved fist, and the man tumbled into the filthy water. “Loosen the mooring, push away,” said the Scarecrow, “the neighborhood will be in flames by dessert time.”
2
CANDLE PUT DOWN the domingon to rest. Her fingers were swollen with long red welts. She’d been working hard. The young man—they called him Liir, was it?—breathed shallowly, but regularly. And he hadn’t twitched a muscle in the hours since Candle had started playing to him.
At the sound in the doorway, she turned. She expected the Superior Maunt, but it was her grouchy kitchen boss, Sister Cook.
“Someone landed a cushy job where she can sit all day,” said Sister Cook, without real resentment, but she had eyes only for the victim. Hardly nightfall the first day, and the maunts in the cloister of Saint Glinda couldn’t curb their curiosity. “He’s not much to look at, is he?”
Candle made a soft sound in her throat, a kind of purr. A demur? Sister Cook wasn’t sure. She knew Candle to be capable of following instructions, so whatever the girl’s limitations were, they didn’t include deafness or lack of language understanding. She just didn’t speak up; with her it was mostly glottal molasses.
Sister Cook wrinkled her nose, as if considering the merits of a joint selected for the holiday roast. A gauze sheet, nearly transparent, casting lavender shadows on the lad’s near naked form. The coverlet was woven tightly, affording warmth, and was light enough to be whisked away when medical attention was required. As the evening c
ame in, the blood blisters under the skin on this face looked like medallions of honor—or maybe the sites of subcutaneous leech colonies.
“I came to make sure you were all right,” said Sister Cook at last, having taken her fill. She turned back to Candle. “Here. We all must do our part.”
She pulled from her apron pocket a long red frond, fringed with airy, asparagus-fern stamens. Candle started, and the sound in her throat was clearly revulsion.
“Not to worry, it was a willing sacrifice,” said Sister Cook. “I was alone in the yard mincing the cord onions when that Red Pfenix appeared again. He was distraught. He’d been attacked and wounded by something; he was bleeding from the throat and couldn’t speak.”
Candle shrugged and hit her chest with her hand, turning it outward.
“Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire hate to administer to Animals, you know that,” said Sister Cook. “But it doesn’t matter. They couldn’t even if directed to. The Superior Maunt sent them away after lunch. Off on some investigative mission about those Emerald City novices who had their faces scraped. So what was I to do?”
Candle reached out and touched the Pfenix feather.
Sister Cook said, “Nearly shorn of life, he came back here. He pulled out his axial feather himself and walked up to me with it in his beak. Swans sing when they die; Pfenix do, too, but he couldn’t. So you make music for him, please. Out of respect; we’re having Pfenix breast tonight.”
Sister Cook shoved both her hands in her apron pockets. “Pfenix breast, though I’ve diced them small and disguised them as chicken fingerlings so our dear old Mother Rush-to-Judgment doesn’t have a conniption stroke. Don’t forget to come down when you hear the dinner bell; we don’t get Pfenix around here very often, Animal or otherwise.”
She lingered a moment longer and watched Candle hold the red feather. It was almost two feet long and still retained some of its vital elasticity. “Well?” said Sister Cook. “I can’t stand here forever. Play a dirge for the Pfenix, who never made it to his Convention or his class reunion or wherever he was going. He was interested in your playing, I saw. Honor him by accepting his gift.”
Candle tried to remember what she had seen of the domingon when it was played by its maker. She had swooned, for music or love or both, and in her exhilaration, maybe she’d overlooked an aspect of the instrument’s construction. Maybe it had had a pfenix feather, and the master had removed it—pfenix feathers weren’t easy to come by. And a Pfenix feather, freely given besides! What she might learn to play now.
She leaned down and laid the quill end of the feather against the empty notch at one end of the domingon’s lower soundboard. It settled in perfectly, as if the domingon had been built to accommodate this exact feather. Then Candle gently coaxed the feather flat. There was a hasp at the soundboard’s far edge, a leather tooth on a sprung hinge that clamped down hard to hold the pinion end of the tailfeather in place.
Candle turned the pegs, listening to calibrations of tuning too precise for Sister Cook to appreciate. Then Candle flung out both her hands at Sister Cook: Go! Go!
“Ungrateful, the both of you,” said Sister Cook. As she descended the stairs, she heard the first few notes of an exquisite instrument being played by an expert. So suddenly it took her back to school days—when she was a nervous slip of a thing at Madame Teastane’s Female Academy, not the cow she’d become—that she had to steady herself against the wall. She was thirteen, and suffering her first menses. Coming back from a dawn visit to the cold lavatories on the third floor, she’d spotted a red pfenix on the roof of the Master’s lodge. The trees had been airy, just budding, struck with first light, and the bird had looked like red cloisonné set in warm stone. A stab of loveliness unmerited, unexpected. It had cheered her then. She continued down the stairs back to the mauntery’s kitchens, cheered again at the long-forgotten thought, though perhaps she was also happy to anticipate a fine, fine meal that night.
Southstairs
1
THE SUPERIOR MAUNT made it her business to get to the infirmary on a daily basis. She didn’t like what she saw. The young fellow made no discernible progress; indeed, a yellowish sweat rolled off him, hinting of turps. His skin was cold to the touch. He was still breathing, however.
“You may wipe him down when he becomes too clammy,” she said to Candle, and showed her how. The girl seemed reluctant to touch her charge, but did as she was bade.
Holy intuition, the Superior Maunt felt, did not figure among her own administrative talents. She was a common-sensist. She thought the Unnamed God had given her a brain to use, not to ignore as a snare of the devil. She had tried to lift herself up by clear thinking, and others, too, when she could.
Nonetheless, it was intuition as much as charity that had inspired her to call for a musician. This Candle seemed perfect: demure, even of temper, and increasingly proficient at her instrument.
The Superior Maunt wasn’t overly worried that whatever had befallen Liir—whatever it was, those bruises, those broken bones!—would afflict her pair of investigators. The young missionaries from the motherchapel in the Emerald City, whose faces had been scraped—the boy himself—were possessed of the loveliness of youth, youth’s fine ignorance of its own fleeting grace. The same couldn’t be said of Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire. Through long years of dedication and hard work, they had grown wizened and doughy, respectively. They would be safe from the attention of those who wanted to despoil the innocently beautiful. And their training in medicine had fostered keen observational skills; they could protect themselves, if anyone could.
The Maunt Superior noted that though her hearing wasn’t good anymore, the music of the repaired domingon had a way of traveling. The entire mauntery was filled with its soft phrases. Sister Linenflaxen said it was elegiac, damn it, Candle was wooing the lad to his final sleep. She should play something peppier. Everyone else said shhhh. The whole place had fallen under a sort of spell. They were waiting to see what would happen, but the music made them patient.
Sister Graveside ironed a fresh winding cloth and refilled the corked jug with anointing oil, to be ready.
CANDLE WAS MORE OBSERVANT than the Superior Maunt credited, though. She could see that Liir’s respiration responded to her choice of music. He went through periods of rhythmic breathing, like someone sleeping peacefully enough, followed by patterns of shallow flutterbreath.
Restored to glory by the feather of the Pfenix, the domingon had become responsive: the harmonic overtones hung in the air and complemented one another. When the invalid seemed too agitated, she would bring him back with long furling phrases. But too many of those and she was afraid he would deliver his last, deep outgo and breathe in no more: and then he would be dead. So she would agitate him with pizzicato comments and thumb-struck flat-tone responses, to alert his lungs and stimulate his heart.
She was guiding him. She knew it. She just didn’t know where he was.
LIIR WAS IN THE STOLEN BLUNT-BOAT with the Scarecrow, heading along one of the waterways of the Emerald City. It was a week or two after the Witch had died. There was trouble behind, and darkness ahead, but the windows of the town mansions that lined the canal—one flight above street level, above the barricaded stables and stout front gates—threw trapezoids of gold light onto the stinking canal water. Liir and the Scarecrow passed in and out of one another’s view.
“What will you do?” asked the Scarecrow. “Where will you go?”
“I have no place to go,” said Liir. “I’m not going back to Kiamo Ko. Why should I? Only old Nanny there.”
“Have you no obligation to her?”
“Now you ask me? In a word, no. Chistery will mind her well enough.”
“The Snow Monkey? Yes, I suppose he will. Well, the story of Dorothy is done. We won’t see her like again.”
“And a good thing, too,” said Liir. “Off and away with the fairies, just like that, and not so much as a decent good-bye!”
“Her depar
ture was precipitous,” agreed the Scarecrow. “Glinda made the arrangements in something of a hurry.”
The light from a party, candles laid out on a balustrade. The music wafting out open doors: agitated phrases, comments and responses, from some instrument with multiple voices, or many instruments playing very close together. Haunting!
The Scarecrow said, “Don’t fasten on Dorothy. Only unanswerable longing lies down that road. Gone is gone.”
“How wise you are, now that you’re packed with brains. Everyone got some party favor from the Wizard except me. Everyone’s got somewhere to go.”
“Don’t look to me for a map, Liir. Figure it out for yourself. What about your friend, Nor? That Princess Nastoya seemed to think she might still be alive. Maybe you could find her.”
“First I better learn a trade and find a way to support myself. Or watch how the pickpockets practice their trade. Sure, I would like to find Nor, but I’d like to fly, too. Not bloody likely without some help.”
“I can’t be much help.”
“Too highly connected now, I’m sure. Too chummy with the chief cheeses.”
“I have my own plans. Appointments to keep. I’m out of here as soon as I can.”
“I thought that Glinda person had singled you out for a lead position in the government. That’s what they’re saying on the streets, where I pick up my news and other garbage.”
“Lady Glinda doesn’t confide in me. I’ve heard she intends to rule for six months or so, and then abdicate in favor of a straw man. Who?—well, as I’ve admitted, one scarecrow is as good as another. Do you think anyone would notice the difference? When a scarecrow blows apart in a gale wind, the farmer just props up another one. It’s the job to be done that’s important, not who does it.”
Son of a Witch Page 7