The Wicked Years Complete Collection
Page 150
They stumped down the stone path to where they’d left the Clock the night before. The assemblage look weather-beaten with age. Which it had every right to look, after all these years.
“I always thought this Clock was apocryphal,” said Liir.
“It is apocryphal. That’s the point.” The dwarf seemed to be tilting into a sour mood.
“I never expected to see it,” said Liir. “Somehow it’s smaller than I imagined.”
“Most of us are. You too, bub.”
Liir had more than his share of personal flaws, but rushing to take offense wasn’t one of them. “How’s this thing work, anyway?”
“It doesn’t. That’s the crisis.”
The stage curtains yawned open like a fresh wound. “Is this supposed to simulate something?”
“Ruin,” said the dwarf. “Of the Clock, or of my life. Makes little difference. Perhaps its time has come. Even a thing can die, I guess. Though I never thought about that before this year.”
“Maybe someone could fix it up?”
“Some magician, you mean?” The dwarf glanced up at Liir. “I know your mother is said to have been Elphaba. The Wicked Witch of the West. Great stage name, that. But I doubt you inherited the talent.”
“I have no capacity. I wasn’t volunteering for the job. I was just wondering.”
“The magic of the Clock doesn’t originate in Oz, so it can’t be amended here.” The dwarf kicked at the hub of a wheel. The drawer with the Grimmerie in it sprung open. “I suspect you were looking for this little number, once upon a time.”
“The Grimmerie?” guessed Liir.
“The same.”
“Yes, I was. Once, anyway. Maybe twice… I hunted through Kiamo Ko for it, but it’d either been hidden or taken away.”
“It’s made the rounds, this great book. It was given to Sarima, your father’s wife; then to Elphaba; then to Glinda, more than once. When it’s not being used it’s come back to me. But the Clock can’t keep it safe anymore, and I can’t determine through the Clock who should have it. So it’s yours now. Happy birthday and no happy returns. I don’t want it. You’re as deserving a candidate as any. Besides, I hear your daughter can read it some.”
“But—whoever brought it to Oz—whoever magicked the Clock—might want it back.”
“Whoever.” The dwarf snarled.
“I mean, your boss.”
“My liege and master?” Mr. Boss made a rude gesture. “He cast me away in this land with a job to do and a Clock by which to count the hours of my service. He hasn’t come back. If the Clock is done counting my shift, so am I. The book is yours, bub.”
“What if I don’t want it either?”
“Try to get rid of it and see what happens.” Mr. Boss grinned, nastily. “I wouldn’t like to be an enemy of that thing. I’ve managed to stay neutral, but even so.”
“Yeah. I’ve tried to stay neutral too. It isn’t always possible.”
They paused, in a stalemate about something neither could name.
“Well. Are you going to pick it up?” asked the dwarf.
“And what if I don’t? I came here with Candle to protect her, to protect myself. I’m not Elphaba. Never could be. I know my limitations. I don’t deserve anything this powerful. I can’t use it and I can’t protect it.”
“If you don’t take it, sir,” said the dwarf, “I shall give it to your daughter.”
So Liir had no choice. A moment that comes, sooner or later, to all parents.
5.
Rain saw Liir carry the Grimmerie into the chancel. She was uneasy about the great book now she knew that Lady Glinda had gotten into trouble by reading it. Yet Rain still felt the book’s subtle allure. Her mouth watered. She was eager not to do magic but to read. She’d had too little reading. What few things that General Cherrystone had taught her were languishing in her head, pollywogs that could never grow up into frogs.
“What you going to do with that?” she asked, as casually as she could.
“I don’t think this is a good thing for you to look at. It’s powerful stuff, from all I’ve heard.”
“I’m powerful stuff.”
He grinned and shook his head. Without having words to express it, Rain knew that a smile tends to avert or disguise the natural tension that pools around people trying to be in the same place at once. But Liir’s smile would have no effect on her. She would see to that. “Where you going to stow it?”
“I don’t know. No place seems safe enough.”
“I’ll hold it for you.”
“That would be like giving you a boa constrictor for a pet. No father would do that.”
“You’re not my father.” The words just slipped out—they weren’t antagonistic, just commentary.
“Actually, I am. Though I surely can see how you might doubt it.” As if he was afraid the book would open up of its own accord, he set it on the ground and sat on it. She hoped it would bite him on his behind. “If you could look in this book, what would you be looking for?”
“Words,” she said, cannily, honestly.
“Which ones? Magic ones?”
She didn’t feel like saying that all words were magic, though she thought so. But she wasn’t skilled at indirection. She was more arrow than hummingbird. “I want to read the burning words,” she said at last.
She couldn’t think of Liir as her father, she couldn’t.
Liir looked at her with sudden sharpness. “What do you mean, the burning words?”
She shrugged at that and she would have wandered off to make a point about how free of him she was. But there was the book. He was sitting on it. She wanted to see where he would put it. In case.
Was he still waiting for her to speak?
She couldn’t force a remark any more than she could force a smile, any more than she’d been able to force herself to read before she’d been taught the rubrics. She waited, squatting on her haunches, casting sideways looks at the Grimmerie in case it began to leak language out onto the stones.
“You want to read the burning words,” prompted Liir.
“Don’t you?”
He blinked. Another language she didn’t get, how people blink. How they make their eyes go wet. “Where do you find the burning words?” he asked her.
She thought of the armada scorching the ice. Something was being spelled out there; fire moved in such a way, and smoke issued from fire, as if to hide what was being spelled inside the heat. Oh, but all that was too fussy a thought. She took up a bug that didn’t mind the chilly air and studied it on her forefinger instead.
She could tell this man wanted her to soothe him somehow. Burning words in his head? She didn’t know what they might be, and it wasn’t her job to put them out. She only saw charred letters in a lake. The alphabetic remains of ships.
“What are you going to be when you grow up?” asked Liir.
She thought and thought about that. She felt her calves begin to ache; she felt the tickle of the bug’s legs against her fingers. Someday, presumably, she wouldn’t have these legs or these fingers, but the legs and fingers of someone who stood as tall as this man could. She twisted in her thinking, trying to be honest since she didn’t believe she could be smart, and she gave the answer to the insect rather than to the man who claimed to be her father. She wouldn’t think of Liir as her father.
What would she be when she grew up? She whispered the answer. “Gone.”
6.
Gone, when she grew up. A terrible thought. But in a way she was gone already, right now. Her form had come back to them but her spirit was balking.
Candle mourned that Rain wasn’t bothering with her much. Liir asked himself: What mother wouldn’t? But it seemed as if, instead of Liir’s and Candle’s warmth melting Rain’s resistance, it worked the other way around. The child’s aloofness was contagious. Candle and Liir were learning to weather a mutual pain separately, independently. No matter the closeness of the marriage bed, the history between them.
He didn’t want to crowd his sister any more than he wanted to crowd his daughter. He watched Nor move about with a woodenness that sometimes seemed like grace, and sometimes not. Maybe this was her normal way? He wouldn’t know. He hadn’t seen her since she’d been abducted. Back when she’d been a girl roughly the age that Rain was now.
Never confident about women, Liir scrutinized his sister—with equal parts interest, patience, and suspicion—to see in what way might she turn out to be damaged.
As if he were writing a catalog on the subject of human misery.
Another way to avoid admitting how it had settled in too close, like lice.
The opportunity to engage Nor without threatening her arose naturally enough. Every couple of weeks Liir was in the habit of descending from the mount to a wildwood garden. He collected mushrooms, fiddleheads, frostflower pods, and lettuce. It was half a morning’s hike. The next time he needed to thin the lettuce or lose it, he bundled up a few baskets, some stakes, a trowel, and he asked Nor to come along.
They strolled equably enough, chatting about the landscape and the moods of the climate. From time to time they fell into silence. A bird hopped on a blighted oak limb. A few chipmunks, at the business of growing their hoards, scampered like shadows of something overhead. The wind sawed through the thickery. You could hear the autumn inching in.
“Looks as if this has been a productive yard for generations,” said Nor, indicating the ancient stone tablets tilting at the end of the sunnier furrows.
“Behold: here lies the last person to tell the truth.”
She blinked at him.
“Sorry. Graveyard humor. But if those stones ever said anything like that, they stopped saying it long ago.”
Nor nodded. “They look like teeth. And your hermitage, or whatever it once was—it looks like a mouth too. A big open jaw swallowing the wind.”
“Swallowing the poppy trade, probably,” said Liir. Nor raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know about the poppy trade?”
“I don’t know much. Even though we swam through the bloody sea of them.”
“Sometimes the Yunamata venture south as far as here to harvest the poppy pods. The takings are useful for their groggy rituals, and the illegitimate opiate market is always eager to barter. Your little Munchkinlander apothecaire knows all about that, I’m sure. Some of the harvest seeps through the black market for smoking in certain parlors in Shiz and the EC, I’m told.”
“You’re not an habitué?”
“I haven’t been into a parlor of any sort since I grew facial hair.”
Nor bent to pick the lettuce, which was near to bolting. “Situated where it is, maybe your private stronghold used to be a countinghouse for the poppy merchants. Or maybe the defense headquarters against such a trade.”
“Whoever might tell us is probably long ago buried in the lettuces. It’s all guesswork.”
“But the trade has dropped off?”
“Seems so. Certainly the EC authorities don’t approve; they’re afraid the opiates will get to the conscripted soldiers and erode morale. You didn’t see sign of anyone marking out a little meadow for harvesting?”
“Not a soul.”
They worked in companionable silence. Liir staked the stems of frostflower so they would winter over. They were best cut down in the early spring. Finished with the lettuce, Nor put her hand on the small of her back and stretched. She dropped the heap of curled green pages into her shawl, and turned her attention to some radishes, but she gave up when one after another pulled up mealy. “What next?” she asked.
Liir leaned back on his heels. “I have something to show you.” She waited. He pulled from his tunic a folded bit of paper. “I found this at Kiamo Ko. Can you bear to look at it?”
She came over to squat next to him. The browning paper, creased into softness, showed a faded drawing of a young girl. Hardly more than an infant, though with a certain crude spark in the eye. A personality. The letters in childlike hesitancy said
Nor by Fiyero.
This is me Nor
by my father F
before he left
It took her a half an hour to compose herself. Liir left his arm slung around her as if around the shoulder of a drinking mate—not too close. Not imprisoning. Just there. When she was ready, she tapped the page twice with a forefinger and said, “I found that drawing before you did. It was in the Witch’s room at the castle. My father had drawn me for his mistress, and she had kept it. She who seemed impervious to sentimentality had kept it all those years. When I came across it—I must have been rooting through her room one day, bored, as children will be—I wrote the caption and put the page back where it was, so the Witch would know she could keep the paper but she couldn’t keep my father from me, not in my memory.”
“How much do you remember about those times? With your mother and brothers and me and the Witch? And those other aunts of yours? Back in Kiamo Ko?”
“I was hardly a teenager when I was abducted,” she said. “And so of course I remember almost all of it. Or I thought I did. But I’d forgotten this.”
“Do you remember they took me too?—but Cherrystone decided I wasn’t worth the labor of hauling overland? He left me tied up in a sack and hanging from a tree. I had to gnaw through the burlap, which took the better part of a day … then I fell twelve feet and almost killed myself. And by the time I came around, you were gone. You were all gone. I made my way home to the castle and waited for the Witch to come back—she was in Munchkinland, I think. That was just when her sister, Nessarose, orchestrated the Munchkinlander schism, and they seceded from Loyal Oz.” He’d been talking too fast. He slowed down. “What happened to you when they took you?”
“What I do remember I don’t want to talk about.” She’d been with her mother and her older brother, Irji. And those aunts. Gruesome. Maybe Nor was right: maybe Liir didn’t really want to know. After all. Nor had been the only one to survive.
“Do you know that I talked my way into Southstairs Prison to find you?” he asked her. “After the Wizard abdicated and Lady Glinda came to be Throne Minister? My guide was none other than Shell Thropp. Shell Thropp, the Witch’s brother. My uncle, though I didn’t know it yet. A cad of the first order, and now he’s the Emperor.”
“We’ve just learned he’s divine. Being related to him, does that make you a saint?”
Liir bowed his head, though not in piety. “When I finally got into the prison, you had just escaped from Southstairs. A few days earlier. I was that close to finding you. They said you’d hidden yourself between the corpses of some Horned Hogs and been carried out in a pudding of putrescent Animal flesh.” He tried to laugh. “Really?”
“I don’t care to think about it.” The way she spoke told Liir it was all too true.
“It sounds as if you were so close to Cherrystone at Mockbeggar Hall. Didn’t you want to take revenge on him? After all, at the Wizard’s instructions he abducted and murdered your family. Or had them murdered. Much later, once I went AWOL from the service of the Emerald City Messiars, he began to have me hunted too. He attacked the mauntery called Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows because we were said to be there. He—”
“We? You and Candle?”
“Me and Trism. My bosom companion. We’d torched the stable of flying dragons that were being used to terrify the Scrow and the Yunamata, so Cherrystone was out for our blood. And when Cherrystone caught up with Trism at last he probably beat the bloody hell out of him. Listen, at Mockbeggar Hall, didn’t you want to put a stiletto through Cher
rystone’s throat? I would have. Wanted to, at least.”
She went back to the lettuces and began to arrange them in ranks of size, as if that mattered. Her voice was flat and unconcerned when she spoke again. “I’ve spent all my adult life either fighting the excesses of the Emerald City hegemony or trying not to fret myself into paralysis. One can only do what one can do, Liir. Today I can harvest a little lettuce. Tonight you and your wife and your child and my unlikely husband and your Goose and my colleagues, Mr. Boss and Little Daffy, will have some lettuce to eat. One day perhaps I will not find lettuce in my hands, but a knife. Maybe General Cherrystone will have come to eat lettuce but will dine on the blade that cuts the lettuce. If I only think about that, I can think about nothing else, and then I might as well lie down under these stones and join the others who can’t think anymore, either.”
In a steely but warm voice, she added, “I might ask the same of you, Liir. Cherrystone’s zeal to find you, because you might lead him to the Grimmerie, has broken you apart from your own daughter no less fiercely than I was broken apart from my mother—and from my father. From our father. You might’ve spent these years of your strong youth hunting him down.”
“I might’ve done,” he agreed. “But if I’d been unsuccessful, Rain would’ve had no father to come home to, sooner or later. A fate we fatherless understand, you and I.”
“We do,” she said. “We understand lettuces, and we understand that. We don’t understand Cherrystone. But we don’t need to. Maybe.”
They walked back to the hostel slowly, without talking, that final maybe like a heavy boulder slung between them, on a yoke laid across both their backs.
7.
About the darkness recently apparent in his wife’s eyes, the Lion was puzzled. He knew Ilianora hadn’t been prepared to find her brother. She hadn’t been looking for Liir. Maybe having found him, then, had slapped awake an old buried ache for others who’d been slaughtered.
This was a sore that Brrr couldn’t lick clean no matter how he tried. Maybe if Rain had taken to Nor … maybe his wife would have softened a little more … but no. Rain never took to anyone.