The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  Rain thought, but she didn’t ask, How do you know what they are? “Here’s a set of illuminatums,” she said, reading the cover. “Views of Barbaric Ugabu, with Discreet Commentary by a Missionary.” She wasn’t too old yet to stop being proud of how well she could read.

  “Your wares come from all over,” said Tip to the Bear.

  “So do my clients,” he replied.

  “And this is a stuffed scissor bird. I think they’re extinct now.”

  “Well, that one is extinct, anyway.”

  The Bear shuffled to his feet and poured himself a cup of tea. “You’re standing on a flying carpet,” he said.

  “Is that so?” asked Tip and Rain at once.

  “Assuredly so. Full of flies.”

  Oh, but the place was musty. In one alcove a number of old tiktok contrivances stood in various stages of evisceration for spare parts. “The tiktok revolution never quite happened, no matter what the Tin Woodman said,” commented the Bear. “Who needs a rebellion in labor when honest laborers are hunting for a job? I’m speaking of humans, of course; most of the Animal workforce migrated to Munchkinland during the Wizard’s reign. If they could afford the punishing fees to process their applications.”

  Rain guessed that the Bear wasn’t one of them. “You’re doing all right,” she said, unargumentatively.

  “I’m one of the luckier ones,” he replied. “I suffer a sort of amnesia, you see, and I am happiest among artifacts and antiques. Times gone by are more comforting. I don’t understand these days.”

  “Not many do,” murmured Tip.

  They came across a creature made of skarkbone ribs and hooks. Some of it must be missing, for it was impossible to imagine how it might have stayed erect. In another corner, more or less intact, was a carved wooden man, quite tall, with an enormous porcelain pumpkin balanced on skinny shoulders. “That one arrived with an actual pumpkin head,” said the Bear, watching them over the tops of his spectacles. “Too many mice were making a home in his brains, though, and the pumpkin rotted. As my skull has done too. So when I came across that dreadful piece of porcelain I couldn’t resist sticking it on top of the wooden man, in memory of whatever weird individual that tiktok thing once was. Jack Pumpkinhead, a certain rural type.”

  “It can’t be tiktok without gears and sprockets and flywheels, can it?” asked Rain, remembering what she had seen of the Clock of the Time Dragon.

  “There’s more than one way to animate a life story,” remarked the Bear.

  Next to the pumpkin head stood a squat little copper beast on casters. A perfectly round copper cranium perched atop its round body. After scraping with their fingernails, they could make out the words SMITH AND TINKER’S MECHANICAL MAN on a plate corroded with green blisters. Under that an additional plate had been added, in engraver’s boilerplate: PROP OF M MORRIBLE, CRAGE HALL.

  He’d been messed with quite a bit. Snippers or loppers of some sort had opened his upper chest. Inside lay the dusty fragments of oraculum vials as well as coils and batteries disfigured with mouse droppings. When Rain stood back to get a look at the whole of him, for he was short and overshadowed by the others, she almost blushed. Part of the abdominal plate had come away, and a five-inch screw to which a couple of nuts were attached hung down obscenely between what you might call his legs.

  “Look, we can do a Butter and Eggs lesson,” she said. Before she remembered that Tip had not been in the class, she’d cupped the rusty ribbed metal piece in her hand and tilted it forward.

  “Clever girl,” said Tip as Rain’s action wore through a weak bit of the sheathing, and the screw came off in her palm.

  “Don’t break the merchandise,” called the Bear mildly, but he was only responding to the creak of old metal. At his desk behind his stacks of junk he was now shuffling through ancient newsfolds and reading aloud predictions of long dead weather.

  Rain’s manipulation had unstuck some narrow compartment in the tiktok creature’s undercarriage. A rusty drawer with thin black metal edges shot forward and fell on the floor. “We should leave before I bring down the house,” said Rain. “I’m a right danger.”

  Tip knelt and fingered the dark recess. “Something’s wedged in here,” he said.

  He worried out a narrow packet of black cloth. “Treasure,” said Rain, realizing that she knew the word but not, in fact, what might qualify as treasure in anyone else’s mind other than hers. She thought of that tiny perfect inch-high horse on its single curlicue leg, carved in miniature into a stone at the Chancel of the Ladyfish. The horse like a question mark. Why hadn’t she taken that as something to collect?

  “Now what’ve we here,” murmured Tip, unfolding the cloth.

  Not too much—nothing like treasure according to Rain. A small rusted dirk with black stains streaked upon the blade. A set of skeleton keys. Some scraps of pink thread that might once have been rose petals? And a bit of vellum, about five inches square, folded into eight or twelve sections.

  It was too dark to look at it right here. Besides, they both felt responsible. They brought it to the counter and told the Bear what had happened.

  “Well, let’s see what you’ve got there,” he said, putting aside the bits and bobs, and with his shaking paws he tenderly unfolded the parchment. “Looks to me like an old map,” he said. “Sadly, not a treasure map, as children would like. Let’s have a peep.” He adjusted his spectacles. “Hmmm. Seems to be a standard issue map out of some department of government ordinances. Maybe about the time of Ozma Glamouranda? To judge by the typography? But let me find my magnifying lens.” After a search he located the instrument on top of a pile of about forty children’s novels, a matched set that made a column halfway to the ceiling beams. “Now. We shall see what we shall see.”

  “What if we bring the light closer?” asked Tip.

  “My gentle friend, you are the very light of intelligence yourself. Bring the lamp. On a day this gloomy we need all the light we can find.”

  A second look at the map showed it clearly to be Oz before the secession of Munchkinland. The EC wasn’t even called the Emerald City yet. It was an obscure hamlet assigned the name of Nubbly Meadows. However, the general outlines of the counties of Oz seemed more or less correct. Gillikin and Munchkinland sported the greatest number of towns marked out, and the Quadling Country was represented by a single graphic smear simulating a coarse picture of marshland. The Vinkus was called “Winkie Country” and in ink someone had scrawled below, “Utter wildness, don’t bother.” On the left-hand margin, beyond the ring of deserts indicated by a profusion of mechanically applied dots, that same hand had written “water?” and a printer’s hand-stamp of a whorled shell appeared like a messy thumbprint.

  “That’s nice,” said Tip, pointing to the picture.

  “You always liked my shell,” said Rain, remembering now that he had been cradling it the night she had discovered him in her wardrobe.

  Near Center Munch, in Munchkinland, Rain thought at first she spied another shell, one standing on its tip. Or maybe not. Anyway, some kind of squiggly funnel, appended by hand in quick slashes of brownish ink, with an exclamation point beside it. The punctuation mark was underlined thrice.

  “This is an admirable little map,” concluded the Bear. He ran his paw over the Great Gillikin Forest. “I hail from up this way, long ago. Look, does that tiny line read ‘Here there be Bears’? I feel positively anointed with a personal history. Somewhere in that thicket of identical trees I imagine Ursaless, the Queen of the Northern Bears, holding court, as it was back in my day. No,” he said, “I’m afraid you may not buy this thing. It has put me in mind of my past, and that happens all too seldom. If you come back tomorrow I won’t remember you were here today, and if you find this map on top of a chest of drawers I’ll probably sell it to you. Happily. But tonight I’m going to look at this and dream of my home, and better days long gone.”

  The rain was still pelting down, but the drops were less forceful, less like hail. “We
should go,” said Rain. They made their good-byes to the Bear, who already seemed to have forgotten them a little. As they went up the steps Tip took her hand for a moment.

  “Why do you like shells?” she asked, the first thing that came to her mind in the panic of being touched on purpose.

  “I like anything that is home to a secret life,” he said. “I always liked nests, and eggs, and the discarded skins of snakes, and shells, and chrysalises.”

  “We should have bought you that flying carpet,” she said. “Full of flies.”

  The joke wasn’t any funnier the second time than the first, and Tip let her hand go. They walked back to St. Prowd’s in silence to find that the girls had not been hijacked for ransom, Tip was not in line for a prison sentence or a dismissal, and Madame Chortlebush had departed already for her family home, to comfort her grieving parents.

  If Miss Ironish noticed that Rain had been out alone with a boy, she chose to muscle her disapproval down. More likely, thought Rain, she doesn’t really care what happens to any child whose parents don’t bother to show up during Visitation Day.

  But then, come to think of it, Tip himself had shown up on Visitation Day. A fairly acceptable substitution, under the circumstances.

  16.

  Rain thought, it’s almost as if Tip and I got too close, that day in the storm, in the shop of the absentminded Bear. But he grabbed my hand, not I his. Now he seems … aloof. Unmoored. Like one of those floating islands that had occasionally drifted by on Restwater and, catching in some eddy invisible from shore, gently spun in place for a couple of months. Out of reach. Tip was in perfect sight, all aspects of him, just … just further out.

  For a mean moment she thought that he might be taking up with Scarly in the kitchens, a nearer and maybe more approachable friend. But that kind of thinking was solid St. Prowd’s girl attitude. Why shouldn’t he chum around with Scarly if he liked her, and she was right there, shuttling between Miss Ironish and Cook? Why should it bother Rain?

  She attended to her lessons the best she could. She did better and better at them. The weather brightened. She was finishing her first full year with something that approximated honors. Astounding, given the paucity of her primary schooling. Miss Ironish remarked, “You’ve gone from preverbal to canny in record time,” though it didn’t entirely sound like a compliment.

  Soon the school was abuzz with plans for the annual festival of Scandal, a city-wide hullaballoo dating to pre-Wizardic days but suppressed during his realm, due to excessive merriment and mild bawd. At recess older girls nattered to the newbies about it. A King and Queen of Scandal were elected from among the most smoldering of college students at Shiz. Comic pillorings of local magistrates and fellows at college were promised, as well as mock public punishments of random attractive passersby, administered with sprayed water or cushiony paddles. Food stalls everywhere. When the sun went down, candles would be lit in colored lanterns, magicking up the leafed-out tree boughs of Railway Square and Ticknor Circus. Music to dance by, to thrill by, to ignore. And the girls would be allowed to attend for a while, even to wander about, always under the hawkish eyes of their teachers of course.

  The closer the day arrived, the less Rain was sure she wanted to attend. She hardly understood frivolity. The way everyone laughed when a bird shat once on Madame Chard’s hat—but then even Madame Chard laughed. Rain had thought it was neither funny nor not-funny. Women wear hats, birds excrete. The comedy of it seemed impoverished. Therefore, the idea of manufactured hilarity, having a good time by design or intention—well, bizarre. If not impossible or counterintuitive.

  Still, she supposed, since she couldn’t grasp the concept, perhaps that was good enough reason to agree to attend. Something new to learn. She could always beg off early and sneak away. Ever since the day of the rainstorm she seemed to have a special dispensation for roaming by herself, as if she alone of all the St. Prowd’s girls was homely enough not to need close supervision on the street. She looked at herself in the mirror. She seemed merely to exist, neither prettier than an umbrella rack or a potted palm, nor less pretty.

  Tip met her in a hallway between lessons; he was carrying a valise to Miss Ironish’s study. “Are you going to lark about tomorrow at that silly festival?” she asked him.

  “I’ll have to wait to get my instructions for the day,” he said. “Miss Ironish may be going to see her brother, who has been given a few days off from his training exercises. He is hoping for a pass to the Emerald City for some rest and recovery. I may be required to accompany her as a chaperone.”

  Rain’s regret must have showed on her face before she could mask it. Tip said, “I’d rather skive off with you and see what’s going on in the town centre.”

  “If I see our friend the Northern Bear, I’ll give him your regards,” she said airily.

  “Pit,” said Madame Chard from her doorway, “what are you doing loafing about in the hall? Miss Rainary, your books await you. We’re at Lesson Seventeenish. Making the Least of Fractions.”

  The next day Rain’s fears proved reliable; Miss Ironish did commandeer Tip’s company for her excursion. They would travel by the rail line, recently completed, between Shiz and the Emerald City. It would cut their travel time in half, and they would return in under a week. Madame Skinkle would serve as proctress-pro-tem. “Honor her as you would myself,” advised Miss Ironish before alighting the carriage that would take her to Railway Square. Since none of the girls particularly honored Miss Ironish, the instruction seemed easy enough to follow.

  Rain saw that Scarly was also traveling in attendance of Miss Ironish. “I hope you all have a very fine time,” Rain muttered as the carriage pulled away.

  “What’s that, Miss Rainary?” asked Miss Igilvy.

  “Nothing at all. Are you going to the silly affair in town?”

  “Yes,” said Miss Igilvy. “Shall we be chums, after all? I’m going to wear my dotted morpheline with the lace trim. What will you wear?”

  “Clothes, I suspect.” That was intended to put Miss Igilvy off, but it didn’t work. Rain was saddled with Miss Igilvy half the afternoon and into the evening. But she wasn’t so bad. Out of some sour mood, Rain even took her into the shop. The Northern Bear didn’t recognize Rain, and when she found the folded map tossed aside on top of an overstuffed and listing bookcase, she took it to the counter. “Would you sell me this?” she asked.

  The Bear looked at it and named a modest price. Rain hesitated. But the Bear would never miss it. Another theft. She handed over a guilty coin.

  “That kind of dive is what Miss Ironish would have us pass by,” said Miss Igilvy as they left. “Miss Rainary, we’re skirting the main events. It’s getting dark enough, they’ll have lit the trees. I can hear the music. Enough of antique tiktokery and old maps. We’re now, and here.”

  The festival seemed to Rain overloud and feverish, sort of desperate. A fiddler and three country dancers made a ruckus in the square, and barmaids from local establishments were going about with tankards of ale or barleywater. Miss Igilvy and Rain caught up with a couple of the girls who were about to commence to one of the colleges in the fall. “It’s so different this year,” complained a droll young woman whose name Rain had never learned. “I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “It’s a lack of men, you moron,” said her mate. “Look about you. Even the college boys are in short supply. They’ve been pulled for military duty. If you’ve come to the party hoping to snag a snog, I believe you’ll be sorely disappointed.”

  The whole town seemed to have turned into an extension of the experience of life at St. Prowd’s—that is, without the distraction of lessons. Rain found it taxing and crude. “I think I’ll go back,” she said to Miss Igilvy. “Can I safely attach you to these graduates?”

  “Shhh, the Lord Mayor is going to speak.”

  The Lord Mayor of Shiz looked quite a bit like the Senior Overseer of St. Prowd’s. But what a girth of belly!

  “There is a rea
son to celebrate on every given day,” he said, once the crowd had quietened down. “We shouldn’t go about the business of beating our breasts because of the hardships placed upon us by the war. And yet, as we dance and sing and feast and frolic, we should be mindful of our soldiers called up to duty. And we must remember, as all living and sentient creatures do, that the life we have today may be utterly changed by tomorrow.

  “Change approaches as inevitably as the seasons. I urge you not to succumb to the rumors of threat to Shiz that abound this week, but savor every moment the Unnamed God confers upon you. What will happen next week, next season, next year, we will take in its turn. Meanwhile, in the shadow of the hallowed buildings of this ancient university, let us know ourselves to be alive. Whether we are the next generation to study peaceably in this haven or we are the final generation, let us study what we can. Learn what we can. Deliver what we have to whomever comes after, whether they sit in rubble and ashes or strut in finery upon the streets during Scandal Day.”

  He had to blow his nose, and his wife led him off the stage. No one had the slightest idea what he was talking about.

  Madame Chard, the next day, offered a little enlightenment. “I went into a pub—only to visit the conveniences,” she admitted, “and the talk I heard there would have cured your bacon, believe me. In wartime all kinds of nonsense circulates, and we know from history that the enemy will use rumors to terrify the brave patriots at home. Still, you young ladies are old enough to take in what is being said, I believe, if you promise not to frighten the younger girls with the news. It’s being whispered that Shiz has been selected as a new target by the Munchkinlanders. No one knows how an attack will come, as of course our brave army is holding the Munchkinlanders off in the Madeleines.”