The dragons were gone. The ice was gone. The ruins of one ship drifted like a broken island. Two of the ships were yoked and listing. The fourth ship was gone, maybe sunk entirely, or paddled to port somewhere out of sight.
She was sorry for the ships but sorrier for the dragons. She bet no one had asked them if they was interested in swimming boats around. She had helped to ice them in—somehow she knew that. She didn’t know the word ashamed, or even the notion, but she felt punky and wished it hadn’t happened. Lady Glinda was in trouble and there weren’t no other way; but still.
The bits of timber on water looked like broken letters.
This reminded her of the word man. Cherrystone. Once he had found a book with big letters—whether it was for children or for blindish adults she didn’t know—and he had sat it on his knee facing her. She hunched on the floor. He’d taken out his littlish silvery dagger and had used it as a pointer. What’s that? The E. What’s that? The I? No, the other one. The L. Right? Right. And this? The, um, the one like an E. The F! E-L-F? Can you spell it so far?
She could, but for some reason she’d shaken her head. She hadn’t wanted this to go too fast.
Now she saw a big stick and went to pick it up so she could scrape letters into the pine needles. How to spell sorry? The stick wiggled off and she chased it. She knew it had become a snake, but maybe it would hold still and be a stick for her. Maybe it could spell better than she could. “Wait.”
It hustled away, but slower, she thought; it was considering her plea. Then it paused and turned its needle head. It was allover green except where it wanted to be brown. Its eye—she could only see one—was a tight shiny opaque black lentil.
She said, “Did you wriggle up from the water this morning? Do you know what happened down there? Is those dragons friends of yours? Is any of them okay?”
The snake lowered its head, perhaps in mourning.
“One of ’em flied away. Did you see that part?”
The snake didn’t move, but Rain thought it maybe looked a little interested.
“Oh, it did. I en’t got any notion where it flied itself off to. Out beyond the shores over that way.”
The snake seemed to be trying to turn a different color, to blend in with the bit of lichen on one side and a scrap of stone on the other, but it was slow work. She squatted down to watch it go. “Whoa-ey. I din’t know snakes could shift to green and back agin.”
The creature’s lidless eyes were baleful and patient. “A lot could go green if they tried harder,” it said. “Keep it in mind.” Rain reared back, never having met a talking Snake before, nor heard of one even. She thought they were only storylike. The Snake finished its conversion to camouflage, and she couldn’t see it anymore.
She missed the Snake but she appreciated the advice. “Right-o,” she said to where it had been. “Oh and—sorry.”
4.
Rain told them about the ships all ruined, and the dragons, dead or fled. The companions looked at Mr. Boss. He just shrugged.
“Assuming most of the soldiers survived and regrouped on shore, Cherrystone’s first order of business will be to find us,” said Brrr. Patient as a marmoreal Lion. Though he was finding it hard not to scream. “The Clock predicted a watery rout, remember? And Cherrystone might guess we had a mighty charm for making it come true. We really can’t hang around waiting for the Clock to stamp our hall slip.”
“Hey, the Lion’s right. We’ve been romping back and forth across hostile ground for the better part of a year now.” This from a boy with a chestnut mop. Brrr had never heard him speak before. “With that watery zoo in flames last night, we’re going to be everyone’s first target of revenge.”
The towhead said, “And how. Thankth to the bloody Clock’th little prophethy to the military. That wath a collathal fucking mithtake, that wath.”
Yet another virgin opinion: “It’s time we decided which way—”
The dwarf interrupted the boy. “When you start to think about deciding, it’s time for you to decide to leave.”
“Maybe we will,” groused a fourth fellow. “Being wanted in military sabotage is different from being a hand servant to Fate.”
“And you can’t risk bossing Fate around,” spat the dwarf. “You’re going to second-guess me, get out. I mean it.”
The speaker, a kid shaggy with corkscrews of cobalt black, lost a measure of his resolve. He backed up a step, as if to give the dwarf room to back down too.
“I’m not stopping you,” said Mr. Boss, “nor you other fellows. We’ve managed for years either to negotiate a kind of diplomatic immunity or to squelch out of any cowpie we happen to step into. Our stretch of luck might be over, though. Get used to it or get another hobby.”
“But luck, what is luck, up next to Fate—” The boys couldn’t wriggle out of the propaganda snarled around their hearts.
“Save yourselves. Last one to leave, put out the moon. You too, daughter.” The dwarf pointed a gnarled forefinger at Ilianora. “Nothing’s holding you here.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she responded. “Yet.”
The lads were packed up and ready to leave within the hour. Abandoning their orange camisoles, they hoisted rucksacks on their backs and tied civilian kerchiefs at their necks. They figured to strike out north across the Pine Barrens, avoiding militias of either stripe.
Brrr thought it best. These boys hadn’t signed on to become agents provocateurs in some accidental war. Most of the lads had wanted merely to see the world and to claim their importance as acolytes of history. Or to postpone indenture in some family grocery or gravel-and-sand concern.
“You’re next,” said the dwarf. “Out. Vamoose. Scrammylegs.”
“Not without you,” said Ilianora. “Mr. Boss, you’re not yourself.”
“I’m not going anywhere with that ruinous child,” said Mr. Boss.
“If we leave, you’re not going anywhere, period,” observed Brrr. “You just dismissed your backup labor force, and I’m the only one left who can drag that Clock. Unless you’re ready to walk away from it.”
“Curses,” bellowed the dwarf, and demonstrated some.
“Hush,” said Ilianora. “If they’ve really decided to hunt us down, you’ll only pinpoint our location for them.”
The dwarf went and sat under the wagon.
“I’m all packed,” said the Lion to his spouse. “Nothing holding us, I think. Since we seem to be dismissed.”
“He rescued me,” said Ilianora. “I can’t just leave him over this slight difference of opinion.”
“Why en’t you ask the Clock?” suggested Rain. “If you talked nice to it? What’s its name, anyway?”
Ilianora gave the wrinkled wince that, in her, passed for a grin. “Oswald. But I think of it as Oswalda.”
Rain went to look at it. “It en’t very breathy,” she admitted, but she walked about it, giving it the benefit of the doubt. From beneath, the dwarf pitched stones at her scraped ankles.
Brrr saw the dragon as a cutthroat charm, a vulgar but effective contrivance of tiktok ingenuity designed to remind gullible audiences of the archaic folk belief known as the Time Dragon. Though himself reared without such nonsense—because self-reared—the Lion had learned of Oz’s origin legends well enough. The snot-fired underground creature, asleep in some unreachable cavern, dreaming the universe from its beginning. A fiery fatalism.
And not the only type of fatalism to grip Oz. Other more phlegmatic theories proposed existence as the result of some unholy combustion of oils and embers. Even today, some peasants credited their filthy lot to the dilettantism of Lurline, the Fairy Queen, trying her hand at creating a world. And eggheads smart enough to suffer gout or glaucoma argued that life was a benighted experiment in ethics or cruelty invented by the Unnamed God. But the dragon story was older—so old in folk knowledge that the dragon had no name. Oswald was a nom de théâtre: deep fate is always run from behind the curtain, from which we are asked to divert our attention.
Today the dragon of the Clock was inert. A clapped-out heap of oxidizing technology. Could it be a disguise? Oswald had so often seemed a half-creature, sinister in its apparent sense of impulse, decided in its attitude toward wrong and right. The dragon’s head had rotated like the headlamp of some pedicycle rollicking down the college lanes of Shiz. The jaws snapped in four different positions. None of them smiling. When did conscience smile?
“It looks deaded out,” concluded Rain, cheerfully enough.
“Rain, a little less noise,” suggested the Lion. No sense in salting the dwarf’s wounds.
“Why en’t we hunting in the Grimmerie for words to wake ’m up?”
“Couldn’t hurt,” said Brrr. “I vote yes.”
“Suddenly we’re a democratic synod? That’s what having children does for you? Remind me to neuter myself with a grapefruit spoon.” But with what Ilianora had been through, that remark was thoughtless, and despite his distress the dwarf caught himself. “Oh, all right. But I’m not promising to play by any suggestion a stupid book makes, magic or not.”
He got the Grimmerie out of a drawer that opened with a pop, as if it had been eager to deliver the book to Rain. “Reading never did much for me, in my line of work,” he grumphed.
Ilianora spread her shawl on the needled ground, and Mr. Boss dumped the book upon it. “I don’t like to touch the Grimmerie,” said the woman, but Rain knelt down before the tome. She put her hands on the cover as if she’d like to hug the thing, and opened the great lid of it.
“It feels hummy. Like moss with sugarbees in it,” she said.
“And you look like clot without the cream.” The dwarf snorted. “Find what you need to find and close the damn thing up again. It makes me nervous. This book isn’t for the likes of us to examine. We’re just the keepers.”
“Maybe the world is changing,” said the Lion, “and it’s up to us now.”
The dwarf stifled himself as Rain turned the versos. Today each page seemed made of a different sort of paper. Different colors and weights, sieved and pressed with a variety of trash: rag content and straw, string and fuse. To Brrr’s eye the hand-lettered words seemed overly hooked and pronged, a foreign language if not, indeed, a foreign alphabet. Though his spectacles needed updating. Sometimes the marginalia designs appeared engaged and in motion, flat little theater pieces performing for themselves. On other pages a single portrait without caption stared out, its eyes moving as the page lifted, wavered, settled, was covered by the next. “How do we even know what we’re looking for?” asked the Lion.
“When we find it,” said Rain. Simple enough.
Brrr saw it before she did. They had come upon a page that seemed sheathed in ice or glass, across which embossed patterns of frost and snowflake were wheeling, interleaving the way, presumably, the cogs of the Clock did when the Clock was in fettle. The paper glinted with sparkles as of light on snow. Rain said, “Is this calling winter upon water?”
“Who knows?” said Brrr. “No text I can recognize, unless the snowflakes are their own prose. The book has stopped riffling itself, though. Seems to be the destination page, anyway.”
The girl agreed; she clasped her hands over the page eagerly as if to warm herself on a winter’s afternoon. “Where is my mittens?” she murmured, almost to herself.
The snowflake patterns pulled apart like theater curtains, revealing a dark blue background that filled the whole page, like a night sky during Lurlinemas. Stars shone in midnight ink. “If this is an advertisement for classes in faith formation, honeyclams, I’m taking a match to the whole damn thing,” whispered Mr. Boss.
“Shut up,” said Brrr politely.
A single dot of white began to grow larger, as if nearing from a great distance across the heavens. It looked like a sort of snow globe, of the type Brrr had seen in the shops at holidays. An ice bubble, maybe? A perfect crystal drop. Hovering. It swelled almost to the margins of the page. When it stopped, they could see that the globe was clear, and a hunched figure imprisoned within.
“The Z in the O,” said Rain.
They couldn’t quite tell who it was.
“It’s meant to be Lady Glinda,” said Mr. Boss, despite himself. “People said she used to come and go by bubble. Though it was really a White Pfenix.”
“No, it’s meant to be Elphaba, only you can’t see she’s green,” said Ilianora, “not behind that icy white window. It reminds me of her crystal globe at Kiamo Ko.”
“It’s neither.” The Lion didn’t know why he felt so decisive about it. “It’s Yackle. Old Mother Yackle, the senile sage of the mauntery. She’s the one who took up lodging within these very pages, if you recall. And the glass ball—maybe that’s what’s become of Shadowpuppet—Malky, the glass cat. It has swallowed her up as if she were a bird. Well, she had those wings, remember.”
The figure—it was surely a she—pointed out at them as if she could see them from the book. One finger at Brrr, one at Ilianora, one at the dwarf, and one at Rain. With her other hand she collected four upright fingers and bunched them together like asparagus spears tied with string. She gripped them, indicating—quite cleary—together. Together.
Then she raised her right hand and pointed over their shoulders. South. She made a shooing motion with her hand, a farmwife annoyed by chickens. Go! Go. Together. South.
Flee.
Hurry!
“She could get a job at Ticknor Circus doing charades,” admitted the dwarf. “She’s pretty good, though who’s to say she’s not some dybbuk tempting us to our doom?”
The snowflakes began to close in, obscuring the figure. The Grimmerie became stiff, the pages blocked. Nothing to do but close the damn book before the ground around it began to ice up and the Grimmerie froze to the earth.
“I’m going south,” said Brrr. “With Ilianora and with Rain. I’ll haul the Clock if you choose to come along, Mr. Boss. If you can’t bring yourself to join us, well, it’s been jolly when it hasn’t been a total nightmare.”
The dwarf pulled at his hands, all but whimpering, “The Clock said no girl.”
“Haven’t you ever known a Clock to tell the wrong time?” Though Brrr stopped there.
“All right. I’m beat.” The dwarf walked up to Rain; their faces were almost the same height. He waggled a finger. “But hey? Little funny kid? You’re not to touch this book again. I don’t like that look of entitlement on your smug face.”
“It’s called reading,” she retorted.
Whatever else they griped about—whoever the image had meant to remind them of, and they argued over it—they’d come to agreement about this much, at least: better to be caught on the road headed for other mischief than to be found squatting in a cul-de-sac like mice in a tin bucket. Since the battle for Restwater might be joined again at Haugaard’s Keep, to the east, then they’d head around the western tip of the lake, until they could follow the book’s advice and turn south.
Now the Lion discovered that the boys had been letting him do all the work since the day he arrived a half a year ago, back when the autumn came upon them to the sound of gunpowder explosions and the odd bugle bravocatory. The harness strained against his shoulders no less than it had last week.
The dwarf walked on one side of the wagon, Rain on the other.
Some lives are like steps and stairs, every period an achievement built on a previous success.
Other lives hum with the arc of the swift spear. Only ever one thing, that dedicated life, from start to finish, but how magnificently concentrated its journey. The trajectory seems so true as to be proof of predestination.
Still other lives are more like the progress of a child scrabbling over boulders at a lakeside—now up, now down, always the destination blocked from view. Now a wrenched ankle, now a spilled sandwich, now a fishhook in the face.
And that would be my method of locomotion, the Lion concluded. Not diplomas earned, but friendships bungled. Campaigns aborted. Errors in judgment and public humiliations. Not for not
hing does the assignment of hauling the Clock of the Time Dragon between the shafts of a wooden cart seem a sort of vacation. A Lion in Oz glows in the gloom: hustlers and harlots, here’s your mark! But adjacent to the Time Dragon, however slackened it might be, a Lion could enjoy being overshadowed.
5.
Deciding on a destination always makes the weather improve, or seem to improve. Though the sun remained brutal and the winds weak, and the humidity felt heaped on like a sodden coat, the uncompanionable companions stepped sprightly. The farther they got from Mockbeggar Hall, the better off they’d be. The pines gave way to long gravelly stretches, like dried-up streambeds, perhaps evidence of a flow that had once moved from Kellswater into Restwater. The companions camped by day if they could find shade; by night they trod, wordless and lost but not, Brrr thought, in despair. Or not yet, anyway. As soon as the moon sank they stopped and rested too. No matter how hot it was, Rain slept against Brrr as if she were his kit.
Some days later, on the horizon, the first of the great oakhair trees began to lift their frondish heads. Brrr remembered this terrain from last fall. At noontime, they came within sight of the mauntery where Brrr had interviewed Yackle, and she him.
It sat and sulked by itself on its flat, like an armoire set out on a lawn. It looked deserted, but Brrr didn’t propose going nearer to satisfy his curiosity. Neither did anyone else. They kept to one side of the establishment, pushing south, deeper into the oakhair forest.
Ilianora carried the scythe the boys had sometimes wielded and she knocked down what bracken she could. If shadier, the woods were stiller, too. More spiders. Brrr hated spiders, but Rain scurried sideways to peer through each fretted oculus.
“What are you looking for?” he heard Ilianora ask her once.
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “The spider world. The world the spider sees. The other world.”
“Little goose.” Ilianora takes such a fond tone when trashing the dreams of the young, Brrr observed. “Little monkey. Little moron. There is no other world. This world is enough.”
The Wicked Years Complete Collection Page 139