“Of course not. I was just testing to see if you’d regained any more of your marbles. I don’t think you did your cause any good, by the way. Being so scatty.”
“I don’t imagine you’ve seen Toto? My little dog?”
“Never met the chap, and have no interest.”
Dorothy crossed her arms. “Temper Bailey, are you sorry you took my case?”
“Sorry doesn’t begin to cover it. I’ve lost my home and my family, and my professional reputation. I haven’t been eating well and my pellets are punky. If I’d known you would be coming this way I would have hid in a roasting pan somewhere with a gooseberry in my mouth and a twig of rosemary up my ass.”
“So you won’t join our merry band?” asked Rain.
“You losers?” The Owl hooted. “Dorothy’s gathering another pilgrimage to storm the gates of the Emerald City? In the fine tradition of the Wizard, the Emperor’s going to grant you all your hearts’ desires? Forget it. Besides, I thought the Lion already got his medal for courage.”
“Get out of our way,” said Little Daffy.
“You have no way,” said Temper Bailey.
Mr. Boss stooped down and picked up a stone.
“Stop,” said the Lion. His voice buzzed with catarrh; he hadn’t spoken in days. “He couldn’t help what happened. The Owl was set up just as mercilessly as Dorothy was.”
“If you should come across a Goose called Iskinaary—” began Rain, but Temper Bailey had taken wing.
“If he’s such a crabbycakes, can we even trust his directions?” wondered Little Daffy. “Maybe he’s flying off to alert the authorities we’re coming.”
“Cheeky twit-owl. I should have popped him one,” muttered the dwarf.
“We’re walking into trouble any way we go,” said Rain. “We can’t stop now. Let’s press on. Surely we’ll find another shortcut through to the Yellow Brick Road. If we accidentally detour to Shiz, well, maybe some good will come of it. Maybe we’ll find they’ve taken my father there instead of to the Emerald City, for some reason. We can always take the train, or follow the Shiz Road to the EC. If we need to.”
“You’re still so young,” said the dwarf. “The world is so big, and you always think you’re going to walk right down the middle of it.”
10.
The first thing to return was a sense of smell.
Oh, it was rich. A sense like none he’d ever had before. Confounding, complex, an appreciation of distinctions changing instant by instant. A symphonic approach to odor. Aromas were not separate after all, nor settled. They changed in relation to one another, varying as quickly as the shadows under a young summer tree in a high wind.
He could tell the separate ages of the wood from different pieces of furniture and from the doorframes; he could even tell it was furniture and doorframes before he opened his eyes. He knew about the mothballs in the third drawer down (he could count with his nose) and the relative moments of death of the generations of moths that had immolated themselves around the globe of an oil lamp overhead. He could tell colors too.
Time to open his eyes.
He was lying on his side. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here, or whether he’d always been an Elephant. He did remember he was a he, but his name took a little while to return. He couldn’t lift his head and he wasn’t either uncomfortable or alarmed at the situation. He reached to scratch a patch of dry skin, and the mobility of his nose surprised and delighted him, but he drifted off to sleep again before he could question why he might be surprised.
Then again, it’s always somewhat surprising to wake up and be alive again.
A doctor of some sort was shining a light in his eyes.
“He’s going to come around soon enough,” said the doctor. “Ready to have a drink, little fella?” The doctor pushed a cart with a bucket of well water too rich in the riskier algae, but fresh this hour, and Liir drank it gratefully by suctioning it through his trunk and then spraying it into his mouth, which had gone dry as bones and felt in need of a good gingerscotch gargle.
“Can you speak?” asked the doctor, a little man who was standing on a stool. A Munchkinlander physician.
Liir thought he might be able to, but didn’t answer. He needed to remember more before he spoke.
The next time the door opened, a woman came through it. She was taller than the physician by double, with a head of flaxen-rose hair and a stern and loving expression. “They have said you’re making progress, Liir Thropp,” she told him. “I am La Mombey Impeccata, the Eminence of Munchkinland. I should like you to sit up now and pull yourself together.”
He thought about it, and then heaved himself over by rolling back and forth like an old dog. Under the low table on which he rested, the newly installed supports made of tree trunks creaked, and sawdust sifted onto the slate floor beneath the table.
“You ought to be coming out of your stupor now. I calibrated the semblance of death to last only so long. Can you hear me?”
He couldn’t remember why there might be a reason to hesitate, but he erred on the side of caution. He could smell high intention in her pheromones, and duplicity, and mastery, superscribed with patchouli and underlit by garlic chive.
“I need your help and I need it quickly. I have the power of life and death over your wife and your daughter.”
He could smell the lie, but knew it lay soon enough to the possible truth to be important to consider.
“Nothing has been done to you that you cannot outlive, and much good will come your way if you cooperate. We are within striking distance of the conclusion of this sorry war. The quicker you decide to help, the fewer people will fall. The fewer Animals will die. As I have made you a Black Elephant, I can keep you that way, or I can have you shot like the skark you saw my men take down. It’s your choice. Every moment you delay your return to full consciousness and due diligence is a moment that soldiers put their lives on the line, waiting for you. And a moment nearer to the forced repatriation of your daughter, who is after all, going back a generation or three, a frond of Munchkinland, just as you are yourself. Have you any questions?”
He had a few questions, but he didn’t ask them of her.
She turned to leave. He could smell her dress whispering comments of straw brushing along the slate. The soap that had not been rinsed out well four washings ago. He could smell her anger and her cunning. What he couldn’t smell—and, if he’d ever really been a human man, he didn’t recall having been able to smell it then, either—was the lure of power, the attractiveness of it. He seemed bereft of a certain lust for strength and dominance. He didn’t think the lack had pestered him much.
Unless its absence had put his family in danger all too often. There was that.
At the door, she said, “I know about you. Not as much as I will, not as much as I’d like, but enough. I know you have hesitations and you also have capacities. I know you admire the Elephant as a creature and you consider hiding inside. I know about Princess Nastoya and your campaign years ago to release her from her spell. Who do you think she first turned to, all those decades past, for a charm to give her the guise of a human being? Mombey Impeccata, at her service. I am the foremost master of forms and shapes in all of Oz. Go up against me, Liir, and you will see what form and shape of vengeance that I take against you.”
He closed his eyes. He had already died as a human being, and in fact it hadn’t seemed a noticeable effort. If the time came to die as an Elephant, maybe he would come across Princess Nastoya in the Afterlife. Maybe after all this time he might meet up with Elphaba Thropp again, his so-called mother. He could give her a piece of his mind. He could give her a great thumping with his trunk for being such a bitch.
He smelled time passing as he slept, and learned as he slept to smell it in minutes and hours as well as in warmths and darknesses.
Then he was stronger, and more Liir, more aware of himself as the old Liir inside the Elephant skin, though a changed Liir in ways he still couldn’t sme
ll. There’s a reason we live in time. We are too small a flask, even as an Elephant, to tolerate too much knowing. Instead, truth must drip through us as through a pipette, to allow only moments of apprehension. Moments diffuse and miniature enough to be survived.
The door opened again. Now that he was more aware of hearing, he tried before turning his head to hear who it might be. The little physician? The maid, Jellia Jamb? Or La Mombey herself? If La Mombey, could he smell her as a blonde, or as a Quadling with that plaited dark hair like Candle? Or as a chestnut-coiffed karyatid with lilacs and turquoises in her headpiece?
He didn’t believe what he smelled, so he rolled over and turned his head. His eyes were the least strong of his senses so far, but he strained to focus as well as he might.
The man stood at the door, light glaring around him. The Elephant’s eyes stung for a moment, and so tears stood, but they were tears of ocular pain and adjustment, not of emotion. Not on Liir’s part, though maybe on Trism’s. “Is it you, or is it another of her tricks?” asked the Elephant’s old lover.
Liir might have asked the same, if Mombey had used a semblance of Trism to trick Liir into a confidence, but his nose was strong enough to tell this was Trism, no disguise. He remembered the smell of every follicle root, every breath, every fold and crevice, every secretion and hesitation. The sight and the knowledge took Liir’s breath away, but when it came back, his voice came back with it.
“It is I,” he said, “more or less. Rather more, I should guess. I mean, I’d actually gotten wiry since I last saw you, up until recently when I seem to have put on a few pounds.”
Trism closed the door. He came across the room, but stood outside the range of Liir’s waving trunk, which was raking in ten years’ worth of nasal history, satisfying the longing Liir had so long denied himself the right to feel.
“Why are you here?” asked the Elephant.
Trism drew himself up. He’d gone thicker. A barrel cage for a chest instead of a butter churn. Still, he’d maintained his military trim, a strong stomach and tight waist, and his bearing was all that the Emerald City home guard had taught him years ago.
But he was working for the enemy.
Depending on who was the enemy.
Trism answered quickly enough. “I came over, I fled Loyal Oz after—after you know what.”
“I don’t entirely know what.”
“After we torched the dragon stables in the Emerald City, and we fled by night,” he said. “After we became lovers for a moment. After I followed you to that farm—”
“Apple Press Farm.”
“I remember its name. You weren’t there. After all that.”
All that might have happened with or against Candle, all that she had never told Liir about, never spoken about.
After all this time, though, here stood Trism. If Candle had preserved her feelings for Trism as her own secret, Liir found he had uncovered new reserves of patience to let those feelings remain unknown. Perhaps another skill of Elephants that we so-called humans would be wiser if we could learn.
“You left, under whatever circumstances,” said Liir. He hadn’t moved off the table since he’d been put there, and he was rolling in his excrement, that which the helpers had not been able to reach to scrape away. There was so much of interest to smell in manure, but in any case, Trism didn’t seem offended.
Liir tried to work his huge pie-plate front hooves to the floor, to close the gap that Trism still maintained.
“You left,” said Liir, “and you went over.”
“They were always looking for you. As soon as they’d figured out who you were. You were behind the flight of the Birds, and the Emperor sorted that out easily. And of course Cherrystone knew what the Emperor knew. They put us together soon enough, you and me, and they had me followed, hoping I’d lead them to you. They thought I couldn’t resist your charms enough to save your skin.”
“I was never very supple, but I seem to have sidestepped them a good many years running.”
“Yes, and sidestepped me.”
“I didn’t know where you’d gone, Trism.”
“And you had a wife. You told me about Candle but you never told me about a wife. You had a wife and a child on the way.”
Liir supposed Trism had a point. “If it makes any difference to you, I didn’t know she was my wife at first. Though that’s a bit of a story to explain.”
“I remember. She told me once. You think I have ever forgotten a scrap about you? A single blessed word?”
No, Liir didn’t think that, not any longer. He could smell that it was true. “But why did you come here? If I could go underground in Oz for ten or fifteen years, why didn’t you?”
“Can you fathom what they did to me, looking for you?” Trism didn’t know which of Liir’s Elephant eyes to look into; you couldn’t look into both at once. Then Trism turned around and raked up his tunic and dropped his leggings to his knees, and bent over the sideboard with its medicines and the scrub brushes. His behind was still high and beautiful, if puckered on the flanks of it, and Liir reached forward and caressed it with his nose, traced its cleavage. But then, as Trism rolled a little onto his right side, Liir saw that his mate was not baring himself for mortification or attention. The skin on the forward side, from the second rib down to his left calf, was vitrified pink, hairless as a boiled ham.
“Cherrystone did this,” said Trism, and pushed Liir’s attentive nose away and dressed himself. “Under the Emperor of Oz, your uncle Shell Thropp, Cherrystone did this to me. Cherrystone. Do you think I would stay in Oz where I could be caught again? Slowly peeled away with hot knives? Until I had decided to seek you out and lead them to you, betray you to protect myself from being shaved like a carrot? I’m lucky this is all they took off.”
“You did that for me,” said Liir.
“Don’t look for satisfaction. None of us knows why we did what we did back then. I know why I’m doing what I’m doing now. And I’m here to ask you to listen to Mombey’s request, and help us.”
Liir listened. His ears were big enough now to hear anything.
“Your uncle, taking a leaf out of the old tricks of one of his predecessors, the Wizard of Oz, has been launching an attack on the Animal armies, which have been pushed entirely out of the Madeleines into the Wend Fallows. Another foothold in Munchkinland, see. Shell has ordered the construction of small-scale aerial balloons filled with light gas. He’s sending them over the hills to explode upon impact as they descend. The panic is immense and the Animals are close to scattering, or worse yet, surrendering. If we lose the Wend Fallows, the EC Messiars will be in Colwen Grounds in a matter of days, and it’s all over.”
“Frankly, I’m surprised the Animals didn’t scatter at the first chance.”
“Many of them remember their parents having to flee Loyal Oz a generation ago, under the Wizard’s Animal Adverse laws. They harbor an old grievance, and when Animals fight, they fight fiercer than humans. But few creatures, human or Animal, will fight to the death to defend the honor of a dead generation. So the strictest of Mombey’s human commanders are in charge of the Animals, and the Animal conscripts receive a more merciless punishment for going AWOL than I did.”
“The Animals are an army of prisoners, effectively.”
“Indentured mercenaries. But without pay. You said it. And when those prisoners finally panic and break loose, the bedlam will not be believed. We’re in the final days of this war, one way or another.”
“So why have you brought me here?”
“It wasn’t my idea. Mombey brought you, to read the book to us.”
“I still don’t understand. How are you involved, then?”
“You remember my original training in the Emerald City? Your mother long ago had given the Wizard of Oz a page from the Grimmerie, On the Proper Training and Handling of Dragons. I was the chief dragonmaster. I trained those dragons who attacked you years ago, the ones we later slaughtered before we fled.”
“I remember. Trism the cute dragon mesmerist.”
“When I left Loyal Oz, I carried with me the secrets of the trade. It’s hard enough to secure a dragon’s egg and raise it to life, and keep it alive—dragons don’t like Oz. Oz is too wet and full of life for them. Dragons are desert creatures. But a few years ago Cherrystone got his hands on a clutch of eggs and managed to raise them to maturity. The creatures were to be used in the attack on Haugaard’s Keep.”
“I heard about that,” said Liir, though he didn’t understand that his daughter had been partly responsible for slowing the attack. “Do you remember Brrr, the so-called Cowardly Lion? He told me what he knew about that campaign. He was in the vicinity when it happened.”
“I never met that Lion.”
“The dragons were destroyed, I understand.”
“Not all of them. One of them escaped, and it was found tending its wounds on the banks of Illswater in the south of Munchkinland. It was captured by Mombey’s people, brought north, and stabled not far from here. It yielded a clutch of eggs a short time later. They came to term.”
“With no male to fertilize them? Capable dragon.”
“There is much we don’t know about dragons.” Trism still had that I’m-older-than-you tone, Liir noticed.
“So you’ve raised the baby dragons up, you traitor dragonmaster.”
“I have indeed,” he said. “And not a moment too soon. They’re ready to go. But Mombey knows this is her last chance. She can’t risk their failure. The dragons have to do the job right.”
“She’s not one for letting things slide? Just my luck.”
“She’s been smart about keeping the Munchkinlanders focused and fired up. That show trial of Dorothy happened in the nick of time, as interest was flagging and recruitment was off, what with the endless stalemate. The arrival of Dorothy and the attention paid to her trial helped Mombey corral her first battalion of Animals in a single week.”
“The conscription of Animals was promoted as defense, but really she needed to open a new front in the war. I see.”
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