The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  The man said, “Emperor’s men not welcome in Quadling Country. Heart-of-Mushroom not to sell information to bad men.” He took a mushroom from his basket, scrubbed it against the hair in his armpit, and took a bite. When he offered it around, everyone professed to be full.

  The Lion said, “Would it be better for us to leave the Yellow Brick Road and cut across country?”

  The Quadling shook his head. “You are safer on the road of yellow brick. The trees and vines and clinging growth only thicken as you go south. Also jungle leopard to make short meal of you.”

  “I can take on a jungle leopard,” said Brrr.

  The mushroom vendor snorted and took another nibble. “Also forest harpie and small vicious deadly jungle dormouse.”

  “Well, then,” said Brrr. “I take your point.”

  “But even if you not to believe me, you to think of your baggage,” he concluded. “Quadling Country is wet to the shin.” He looked at the dwarf and then at the Munchkinlander. “Or to the waist. You to be bogged down in mud. Easy for soldiers to catch and kill. But yellow road is built dry and high. You to move deeper from your enemies that way. Faster away from the north.”

  “But they’ll follow the Yellow Brick Road toward Qhoyre, surely,” said Brrr. “They’ll move faster than we can. I’m surprised they haven’t caught up with us yet. What was the emergency that diverted them?”

  “They stumble upon rogue dragon,” said Heart-of-Mushroom. “Not ticky-toy thing like yours. Real one. They stop to try to capture it but cannot to manage it. It fly away. So now they to take up hunt for you again.”

  “They saw a dragon close up, and I en’t seen nothing but spiders?” Rain was incensed.

  “But if we stay on this road—they’ll be following us,” persisted Brrr.

  “No road goes only one way. When engineers to build the only dry access into Quadling homeland, they also build only dry access out of Quadling homeland. So when EC soldiers betray Quadling hosts and kill and steal and burn their bridges? EC soldiers walking away on Yellow Brick Road make easy target for Quadling dart and Quadling arrow.” He spat out a mushroom bug and cursed in Qua’ati. “Quadlings not to kissy kiss EC soldiers any more.”

  “What’s to stop your countrymen from shooting at us?” said the Lion. “I’m from Gillikin originally, and my wife is from the Vinkus. Little Daffy is a Munchkinlander, and Mr. Boss—”

  “I’m undeclared,” said Mr. Boss.

  “We’re a walking gallery of the enemies of the Quadlings. And you’d send us down Slaughter Alley? Hardly sociable,” finished Brrr.

  “Not so,” said the Quadling. “You have your rafiqi, and Quadlings to give you safe passage.” He bowed just a little to Rain. “She is Quadling, no?”

  Brrr looked at the girl. He hadn’t thought of her as positioned anywhere in Oz, ethnically speaking. But Brrr could see what the mushroom peddler meant. Rain’s face was somewhat heart shaped, a little flatter than those of her companions. Her lips fuller. You couldn’t say that her skin was as ruddy as Heart-of-Mushroom’s, but now, in this light, maybe…

  Brrr caught the eye of Mr. Boss. “So the Clock told you to beware of a little girl. Did it. I think the Clock was just jealous. We got ourselves an ambassador.”

  The itinerant vendor spoke to Rain in Qua’ati. She didn’t notice he was addressing her.

  “Not to mind,” he told them. “My people to see what I can see. She is to promise you safe passage on the Road.” He nibbled another portion of his wares and smiled balefully. “Qhoyre is big city where you can to lose yourself. Such a small band of soldiers will not dare to follow you into Qhoyre. You to be safe there.”

  “Safe from soldiers,” said Mister Boss. “How about invisible spiders?”

  They tried to explain what Rain claimed to have seen. “Maybe the Emperor has trained bloodhound spiders through the magic he denies everyone else?” asked Ilianora.

  “Invisible spiders,” said the Lion. “Did I mention that even visible spiders cause me angina of the psyche?”

  They never learned what Heart-of-Mushroom thought about invisible spiders, for at their very mention he paled. In a moment he’d melted away back into the forest, for all practical purposes having gone invisible himself.

  “Another one who didn’t come along,” said Rain. “We isn’t too friendified, is we.”

  13.

  The Quadling’s terror at spiders that only Rain had seen made the adults more squeamish than ever. Rain, however, experienced a sort of gingery buckling sensation inside. People couldn’t see the spiders and they couldn’t see inside of her—they hadn’t been able to figure out that she’d been telling the truth.

  An apprenhension of isolation—that sudden realization of the privacy of one’s most crucial experiences—usually happens first when a child is much younger than Rain was now. The sensation is often alarming. Alone as a goose in a gale, as the saying has it. Rain felt anything but alarmed, though. The invisible world—the world of her instincts—though solitary, was real.

  They heard her singing that night, a rhyme of her own devising.

  Spidery spiders in the wood

  No one knows you very good.

  No one can and no one should.

  14.

  The deeper they penetrated into Quadling homelands, the more signs they saw of Quadling activity. Rushes laid out on the margins of the Yellow Brick Road to dry in the sun. Donkey dung and human feces. A broken harness for a water buffalo. Meanwhile, no alarums of horse hooves sounded behind them. The Yellow Brick Road south of Gillikin and Munchkinland might be Slaughter Alley, but not for a band of irregulars accompanied by a child with evident Quadling blood.

  They made sure to keep Rain front and center, on the Clock’s most prominent seat. No one much believed in the spidery figments, but neither did they believe in taking chances with Quadling poison-tipped arrows.

  “I’d like to know what our intention is, when we arrive in Qhoyre,” Ilianora said as they made an evening meal of poached garmot and swamp tomato. They sat right in the middle of the road, their cooking fire banked up upon the brick. “We’re about to have obeyed the advice mimed out of the Grimmerie. We’ll have stuck together and gotten south. But what next? And why? We’re going to take a flat there? Start a plantantion to harvest mildew? Set up a circus? Learn Qua’ati?”

  “Tut tut, my little Minxy-Mouth of the Marshgrass.” The dwarf fingered out a fishbone. Marriage had eased his nerves somewhat. “No one knows where home is until it’s too late to escape it. We’ll know what to do when we know what to do.”

  “Qhoyre can’t be anyone’s home,” argued Ilianora. “Otherwise so many Quadlings wouldn’t have migrated into the northern cities.”

  “What is the world after Qhoyre?” asked Rain, who seldom listened to their discussions.

  Mr. Boss shrugged. “The Road peters out, as I understand it, but Quadling Country squelches on.”

  “Oh, even Quadling Country ends, eventually,” said Little Daffy. “At least according to the lessons in map reading we got in petty nursery. The province meets up with the ring of desert that surrounds all of Oz.”

  “But what’s after the desert?” asked Rain.

  “More desert,” said the Munchkinlander. “Oz is it, sweetheart.”

  “To hear Ozians speak, other places don’t exist,” said Mr. Boss. “There’s no place to the north, like Quox, for instance, except as a supply of fine brandy and the source of a certain plummy accent. Ev, to the south over the sands, doesn’t really exist—it wouldn’t dare. But oh, we do like our Ev tobacco if a shipment gets through.”

  Rain scowled. She didn’t understand irony. The dwarf, more respectful of Rain now that she was their de facto rafiqi, took pity and explained. “Oz isn’t surrounded by sands. It’s enislanded in its own self-importance.”

  “Hey, Oz is bigger than Ev or Quox or Fliaan,” said Brrr in mock effrontery. “Those dinky sinkholes are hickabilly city-states founded by desert tribespeople.
”

  “Who cares what’s outside of Oz?” agreed the dwarf. “No one goes there. Oz loves itself enough not to care about provincial outposts.”

  “But after the deserts?” said Rain.

  “Ah, the innocent stupidity of kids,” said the dwarf. “You might as well ask what is behind the stars, for all we’ll ever know. The sands aren’t deadly, that’s just the public relations put out by edge communities. Not that I’m proposing we keep dropping south to become nomads in bed linens. The deserts aren’t hospitable. It’s where dragons come from, for one thing.”

  “She wants to know where we’re headed, that’s all,” said Ilianora. “I’m with her on this.”

  “Headed to tomorrow. Equally impossible to tell what’s on the other side of that, but we’ll find out when we get there,” said the dwarf. “Everyone, stop your beefing. You’re giving me cramps.”

  The tomorrows began to blur. In a climate that seemed to know nothing but one season of growth, maturity, decay, all happening simultaneously, perpetually, even time seemed to lose its coherence. The company grew quieter but their unhappinesses didn’t subside. The cost of wandering without a named destination was proving steep.

  Eventually the Yellow Brick Road petered out—brick by brick, almost—but the tramped track remained wide enough to accommodate the Clock of the Time Dragon. The signs of human enterprise grew more numerous. The companions began to spot Quadlings in trees, in flatboats, even on the mud-rutted road. The natives gave the company of the Clock a wide berth but a respectful one. Brrr observed that Quadlings, the butt of ethnic smears all over Oz, seemed in their own homeland to be more capable of courtesy to strangers than Munchkinlanders or Gillikinese.

  Ilianora put her veil back upon her brow despite the steamy everlastingness of jungle summer.

  There was no good way to avoid Qhoyre. The provincial capital had colonized all the dry land making up the isthmus-among-the-reeds upon which it squatted. And squatted was the word. Brrr, who had lived in the Emerald City and in Shiz, knew capital cities to be places of pomp and self-approval. Qhoyre looked mostly like a collection of hangars for the drying of rice. Indeed, Brrr reasoned, that was probably how the city began.

  At ground level, the stuccoed administration buildings showcased an extravagance of softstone carvings both profane and devotional. Above them, ornament was abandoned for louvers, weathered out of plumb, and perforated screens of raffia or stone. Shabby, genteel. The hulks of Rice House and Ruby House and the Bureau of Tariffs and Marsh Law—titles carved not in Qua’ati but in Ozish even Rain could now read—loomed beside soapbone shops that wobbled on stilts above household pork-pen and pissery. But government house and grocery alike featured spavinned roofbeams. To swale away monsoon-burst, Brrr later figured out. Sensible in that climate, though the first impression was of a dignified old city in its dotage.

  The Quadlings swarmed about the companions without evident panic. “They never heard of the Clock,” said Mr. Boss under his breath. “How bizarre. They don’t want a glimpse of the future from us. We could retire here, no?”

  “No,” said Ilianora, spooked by the crowds.

  To Brrr’s eye the Quadlings seemed louche and convivial. They’d survived all attempts by unionist ministers to convert them, preferring their own obscure dalliance with fetishes, radishes, and the odd augury by kittlestones. Stalls on the edge of market squares might be shrines or chapels, or then again they might be the tipping place for one’s household refuse. Little Daffy, with her Munchkinlander’s lust for a good scrub, was appalled. “It’s not even the nakedness behind those loincloths,” she said. “It’s that you can see they haven’t even washed well back there.” With aggressive cleanliness she took to pumicing her own face on the hour.

  When the company paused for the night in a blameless nook, natives emerged from alleys and mews-ways to bring rattan trays of steaming red rice and fresh fruit and stinking vegetables. They set their offerings before Rain as if she were their local girl made good, and skittered away. “Monkey people,” said Little Daffy.

  Rain showed no particular interest in this population to whom, Brrr conceded, she did bear some resemblance. She tried to make friends with the myriad hairless white dogs who cowered everywhere, under open staircases of cedar and rope. Rain put out rice and then fruit, and they would venture forth to sniff at the offering, but scurry back. She tried with some of the brown vegetables, the ones like voluted woody asparagus, and they also turned up their snouts at that. Then she arranged some of the asparagus into a few words—FOR YOU. EAT. So they did.

  “How does she do that?” asked the dwarf of Brrr. “Have you any idea?”

  “I’m the muscle in this outfit, you’re the brains,” replied the Lion. “As long as they don’t come and eat us, I don’t care how she does it. Are they dogs?”

  “Or rats. Or weasels.”

  The torpor of the climate induced a lethargy that the companions didn’t mind indulging; they’d been moving about for some time now. Easier to have your meals delivered than to press on with no assurance of decent foraging ahead. “We’ll know when it’s time to go,” said Mr. Boss, from the hammock he had strung between the post of a bat house and a nearby wrinkleroot tree. “Climb up here and get cozy with me, wife.”

  “It’s the middle of the afternoon and that’s a see-through hammock,” protested Little Daffy.

  “They don’t mind.” And it was true; the Quadlings acted on their impulses when so inclined, without shame or secrecy. Interestingly, Rain seemed not to notice, either. The innocence of that child, thought Brrr, was troubling when it wasn’t refreshing.

  The dwarf and Little Daffy didn’t budge from the vicinity where they’d stodged the Clock. “We have to guard the book,” they reminded Ilianora languidly. “You’re feeling antsy about our prospects, you go find someone to talk to.”

  Brrr’s wife held out as long as she could, but finally she wrapped her shawl so tightly around herself that only her eyes showed, and she began to explore the town on her own. She was looking for someone who could translate Qua’ati for them. She found an old woman in a tobacco shop whose feet had been chewed off by an alligator but who could hobble about on sticks. Ilianora persuaded her to come back to the Clock. The nearly deaf old woman agreed to answer what of their questions she could in exchange for a salve that Little Daffy swore would regenerate her feet—but not for a year, which would give them plenty of time to get far away from her. “Anyway, she’s not going to run after us protesting, is she,” murmured Little Daffy to the others, sotto voce.

  Her name, as near as they could make it out, was Chalotin. A bitter orange rind of a woman passing herself off as a seer. Brrr, who not long ago had spent some intense hours with old Yackle, could tell the difference between chalk and chocolate. Chalotin was rather thin chalk.

  Still, for an old broad she pivoted about on impressively flexible haunches. She ran pinkish fingertips over her perfect ancient teeth as she told them what she knew.

  Yes, she said, though the Emperor’s forces got no love no more, no more, they still made a preemptory show of authority every now and then. The only way they ever arrived was the High Parade, the route the company of the Clock had taken—what was left of the Yellow Brick Road. Quadlings let them pass as long as they marched in dress uniform rather than field garb. They never came in the rainy season, though. Or never yet.

  “So they could tromp in any day,” confirmed Brrr in a soft roar, that she could hear him.

  Yes, her shrugging expression implied. Wouldn’t put it past ’em.

  “Where do they set up?”

  “One of the government houses.” Warming to her subject, she told them that the EC had once kept a firmer grip on Quadling Country, dating all the way back to the days of the Wizard, when the extension of the Yellow Brick Road first allowed swamp engineers to come in and cull the mud flats of their rubies.

  “Emeralds from the northeast, rubies from the south,” said Mr. Boss. “No wonde
r the Emerald City got so powerful, filching from all over. I suppose there are diamonds in hidden caves in the Vinkus?” He looked at Ilianora hopefully. “We could all maybe get filthy stinking rich back at your place?”

  Chalotin didn’t care about rubies except to say that in the act of diving for them, the swamp miners from the EC had upset the crops of vegetable pearls harvested out near Ovvels. It had taken three decades for the agrarian economy to begin to recover, she said, and she predicted it would take three decades more before the natives of Quadling Country could rise to the level of poverty they’d once enjoyed.

  “We are no longer friendly to our overlords,” she finished, spitting, but smiling nicely too. “We are polite but we don’t let them to stay. Not after the burning of the bridge at Bengda. That massacre. Not after attack by flying dragons.”

  “Dragons,” said Rain, looking up. “Have you seen a flying dragon?”

  Chalotin made a gesture to ward off the notion. “When the EC to set flying dragons upon us, oh, years ago, a full five miles of swamp burn south of Ovvels. That much Chalotin know for herself, back when Chalotin could both to walk and to swim. But no dragons since then, no no.”

  “So why aren’t your patriotic fellow citizens tossing us out on our arses?” asked Mr. Boss.

  She replied that the presence of such a young rafiqi required of the Quadlings basic hospitality and even assistance. She indicated Rain when she spoke, but Rain had lost interest and was crawling around in the dirt, pretending to be one of those white hairless dogs.

  “How do we get out of here then?” said Ilianora. “We don’t want to be cornered in Qhoyre if the Emperor is about to send a brigade in after us.”

  Chalotin explained that the Yellow Brick Road only went as far south as here because beyond Qhoyre, arcing first to the southwest and then toward the north, a fairly dry and passable berm already existed. Whether it was a natural feature of the land or the remains of ancient earthworks, no one knew, but if the companions left Qhoyre by the road near the Mango Altar they’d be safe and dry.