“Are they creatures of magic?” another Woodsman asked.
Their answer came from behind them. One of the Emerald City employees was peering into an odd ocular device and studying the Woodkins. “No, they have no magic. We simply believed them to have gone extinct.”
There were whispers behind the Tin Woodsmen as the Emerald City men discussed their plans of action. Nick and the other Woodsmen stared out to the little creatures and it was in that moment that Nick Chopper felt the last surge of dread that his heart would ever endure.
He knew even before the command came what they would be asked to do. And even as his heart sank at the thought, he found his strong hands wrapped around the axe handle, ready to obey.
Then the command came from behind them.
“Level it. Leave no one alive.”
There was only a moment’s hesitation before the forest was alive with the clinking of eight hundred Tin Woodsmen tearing into the clearing, the makeshift armor of their bodies shining dully in the sunlight that crept through the treetops. They entered the clearing with their axes raised. The first blows had fallen before the Woodkin people could fully grasp what was happening.
Nick remembered very little of the event. He had swung his axe in a blind frenzy at anything that moved. His head and dwindling heart had been very aware of the hollow sounds of skulls crunching under his feet and blood splattering against his chest and arms. The Woodkins had only rocks, crude clubs and spears to defend themselves with and they fought with little enthusiasm; they knew the battle had been lost before it had even begun.
The battled ended rather quickly. The forest had been filled with the childlike squealing of the Woodkin people as they were massacred. But even those horrendous sounds had been so brief that it had scarcely disturbed the birds and other woodland creatures nearby.
There were exactly eight hundred and six Tin Woodsmen that surged into the Woodkin camp that day. The Woodkin population, they found after the melee was over, had been only one hundred and thirty.
Once the camp had been cleared, construction on the Yellow Brick Road continued. As they made progress, they buried the tiny bodies of the Woodkin people in shallow holes that were then covered by shining bricks of gold.
Several months later, the Tin Woodsman that had once been a man by the name of Nick Chopper woke up screaming. The Tin Men were allowed three hours of rest per day and ever since pillaging the Woodkin camp, those daily three hours had been haunting ones for Nick. He screamed into the night, the sound of his voice from his tin throat like that of a wounded mechanical monster.
Others stirred beside him but said nothing. From elsewhere within the campsite, one of the Emerald City men barked, “Back to sleep, you!”
But even when he was awake and at work, Nick’s mind would wander. When he swung his axe into a tree trunk it felt like he was hacking into flesh, spilling blood and pulverizing the bones of the Woodkin people. His work began to suffer and he became far less efficient. It didn’t take long before those from Emerald City took notice.
One day, as the army of Tin Woodsmen neared the thicker regions of forest to the west of Munchkinland, several of the Woodsmen had been rounded up and asked to step aboard a peculiar looking carriage. A robed man in a mask sat at the helm of the carriage, hidden by the large flanks of four white horses. He eyed the group of Tin Woodsmen as they stepped aboard but said nothing. Nick had met the man’s gaze as he and his co-workers boarded the carriage and he knew from that single glance that there was trouble ahead.
Along with eight Tin Woodsmen, a single human also boarded the carriage. As the horses pulled them back towards Emerald City on the very road they had helped build, the man held out a crystal ball that glowed a pink light into the carriage cabin.
“Think of yourselves as privileged,” the man explained. Nick stared at that pink hue along the surface of the crystal ball and knew right away that this man was a sorcerer. He had never seen this man in the ranks of the work crew, but his demeanor alone spoke volumes. He appeared to be a high ranking official in Emerald City—perhaps even the Wizard’s own personal magician.
“You see, not only have all of you taken part in the building of this amazing road,” the magician went on, “but now, as we return you to Emerald City, you are also the very first to travel it.”
“And why are there only eight of us going to Emerald City?” one of the eight asked.
“To state it simply, you are defects,” the magician said without emotion. “You see, when you were morphed into Tin Woodsmen, there were certain things about you that were supposed to cease to exist. Among those things were moral reasoning, the bulk of human emotion and your hearts. Of course, as with all creations, there were a few in the batch that didn’t perform as they should.”
Nick thought about how he had felt during the Woodkin massacre. He had felt something similar to regret, a heavy presence in his chest where his heart, even now in the back of the carriage, beat slowly. To Nick, it felt as if his heart wasn’t sure that it was supposed to be beating at all. It felt out of place, alien within the tin housing of its owner.
He also thought about the dreams and how he would wake up screaming. If he had been robbed of a moral compass, surely those dreams would have never surfaced.
“What will become of us?” Nick asked.
But as he stared into the crystal ball, he saw nothing. There was only the pink glow of light from its surface. He could feel something in his head growing heavy. He felt exhausted all of a sudden…so very tired.
A loud clunk to his right broke his gaze from the ball. As he turned to see what the sound was, he let out a loud yawn. The clunking noise had been one of the other eight Woodsmen toppling over. He appeared to be dead but it was very hard to tell the difference between sleep and death when observing his tin body.
“He is merely sleeping,” the magician explained. He opened his mouth to add to this but was interrupted by another loud crashing sound. Another of the Tin Woodsmen slid against the carriage seat and bumped into the Woodsman beside him. He had also fallen dead asleep.
Nick opened his mouth to protest. He even felt his fingers gripping tightly to his axe handle so that he could plunge the blade into the magician’s head. But he was too tired. He couldn’t even move his tongue to speak.
“You will all sleep,” the magician went on. “The Wizard is a kind man and cannot bare to see anything destroyed. You have worked well to this point. It’s just…well, your hearts are getting in the way of your purpose.”
Purpose, Nick thought as sleep wrapped its velvet fingers around him. What purpose is there to come after this? I had no purpose as a man and now my purpose as a Tin Man has come and gone. How dare he speak of purpose to me?
That question went unanswered. He felt his heavy torso lean to the right. His head clinked against the side of the carriage and the last thing Nick Chopper saw before sleep took him was that pink glow from the crystal ball.
Sometime later he heard the sounds of metal on metal. Beneath the clamor, there was heavy breathing and a woman’s voice uttering curses under her breath. He tried to move but felt incredibly sluggish. Not only that, but when he moved his arms, he felt stiff. His arms, his legs, even his head felt as if they weighed tons.
It took a while for him to come around, for his muddied mind to figure out what had happened. He had opened his eyes to that woman’s voice and had resorted back to the life he had lived as a man. His waking mind had temporarily forgotten his other life—the life he had lived as a Tin Man. His arms and legs felt heavy because they were heavy.
But it wasn’t just that. He felt weighed down, as if something were on top of him. With a great effort, he opened his eyes and saw only darkness. He opened his mouth to call out but the task was too much.
From somewhere very close by, he heard the woman again.
“Wretched tin,” she was saying. “Who thought of such nonsense?”
He felt a clamor as her voice neared him. There
was a thunderous crash from somewhere as the reverberations of her movements reached his frame. They coursed through him, tickling him in a peculiar way. He tried to open his mouth again and realized what the weight on top of him was.
He was in a pile of discarded Tin Men. They lay all over him, pinning him down to what was either the ground or other bodies. A pain shot through him and he opened his mouth to let out a weak cry. He had meant to say help me but what came out of his tin throat was only a desperate mewling sound.
“Who’s there?” the female voice said again.
“Here,” he said. His voice sounded like sand on metal. “Help…please.”
The woman’s movements quickened and she grunted as she worked. It occurred to him then that this woman was digging her way through the pile.
“Bang on something, would you?” the woman asked. “It’s hard to find you in this…this mess.”
He flexed his right hand and was aware that he had held on to his axe through whatever had happened to him. He raised it as much as he could and pounded on the nearest surface.
“Ah, there you are,” the woman said.
He felt a slight movement in front of him and then his eyes were assaulted by an intense white light. He closed his eyes against it so he only caught the briefest glimpse of the woman.
“Finally,” he heard her say. “A live one.”
He only groaned in response.
“Give me your hand,” she told him. “Let me help you out of there.”
Blindly, he did as she asked. He offered her his hand, waving it about until she grabbed it. Her hand met his in a surprisingly firm grip. Her hands were delicate, almost bony, and cold to the touch. Even through his tin structure he could feel her chill.
“You may want to wait for your eyes to adjust,” she said. “You’ll need to watch your step.”
He did as she suggested and allowed his eyes to grow accustomed to the light. When he opened them, he saw his savior standing awkwardly before him. She was standing in a haphazard fashion, one foot poised on the back of a Tin Man and the other between two bodies on some unseen appendage of a third.
Nick looked around and saw that they were standing in a heap of tin bodies. He was essentially standing in a Tin Man grave yard—a scrap heap of sorts. He and the woman stood roughly four feet from the floor, standing on a pile that filled the far wall of a large chamber. He did a quick estimate and thought that there were easily three hundred Tin Men at their feet. There were more further up, past his former position in the pile. He didn’t bother looking back to see their numbers, though.
He was more interested in the woman. She wore a peculiar hat on her head from which a sleek mane of black hair flowed. Her face was petite, her nose and chin rather sharp and her eyes seemed to bulge slightly. The black robe she wore seemed to flow over the bulks and shapes of the fallen Tin Men like oil.
“Where are we?” Nick asked the woman.
“Emerald City. This is one of the Wizard’s warehouses. Although—and please don’t take this the wrong way—I can’t imagine why they kept all of you. It’s been years since that damned road was built. And if they couldn’t find a use for you after that, you’d think they would have just scrapped you.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked as they slowly and carefully made their way down the heap of bodies.
“The way I understand it, all of you,” she said, waving her arm wildly around the room, “were defects. The transformation from man to Tin Man didn’t completely take.”
He thought about this for a moment and nodded. “I remember bad dreams. We…we slaughtered a Woodkin village. And then there was a magician with a crystal ball and I—,”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “I have spoken with the Wizard about this. I told him I was in need of someone or something to assist me with clearing out a new property within the woods. For a fee, he let me come back here to see if any of you were still in working order.”
“And I’m the only one?”
“Who knows? But you were the first one I found. The Wizard said that if the defects were brought here due to physical deformities, they may still be, um, alive. But the majority of you were brought here because you were simply overworked and broke down.”
They were on the warehouse floor now, having descended the pile of tin bodies. Nick took a moment to look back to them and he felt that old tremor in his chest, the faint stirring of what was left of his heart.
“There are so many,” he said. ‘My God, how long have we been here?”
The woman looked away from him and headed towards the door. She cocked her hat slightly on her head, reached beneath her robe and withdrew a broom.
“I’m not sure you want to know the answer to that.”
He took a few clunking steps towards her. Tin or not, he still felt as if he had muscles and those muscles had not been flexed in a while.
“I do. Tell me.”
The woman sighed and began plucking the bristles on the end of her broom. “Well, records vary, but it’s been somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred and sixty years.”
What little of his heart was left sunk within his chest. That crystal ball had put him to sleep for that long? How much longer would he have slept if this woman had not come looking for help? He peered back to the heap of useless tin bodies and wanted to collapse to the floor. Seeing them heaped together like that, discarded and of no use, made him think of the Woodkin village.
“Why has this happened?” he asked the woman. He knew that he could not cry, but he tried his best.
“I don’t know. But looking at you right now, I think I know why you were brought here—why you were of no use.”
“It’s because I still think like a man,” he said. “After the Woodkin village, I…I don’t know. It affected me and I don’t think it was supposed to.”
“Come here,” she said, beckoning him forward.
He was walking towards her before he realized it. There was a pull to her, a magnetism that he didn’t understand. But he assumed, from her wardrobe and the broom, that she might be a witch. They were pretty scarce when he had been human, little more than legends. But that was almost two hundred years ago. There was no telling how much had changed in Oz since then.
As he came to her, she placed a hand on his shoulder and ran her other palm along his frame. She started at his brow and made her way down his cheeks, his neck, his chest. Her touch was cold but there was still something nearly sensual about the examination.
“Ah ha,” she said as she neared his chest. “Your heart still beats. As I understand it, the transformation into a Tin Man should have removed it.”
He thought of the Woodkin village and of the wife that had left him in his other life.
“I wish it had,” he said softly.
“You know, dear,” the witch said lightly, bringing her sharp face closer to his. “I can fix that if you want. Come with me—work for me—and I can fix it. And then, without a heart, you can live a very long time. There are Tin Men that worked on the Road with you that are still alive today and making very good lives for themselves. They show no signs of aging, no signs of guilt, remorse or regret. Many people actually envy them.”
“They remained in Oz when the Yellow Brick Road was finished?” he asked.
“Oh yes. The Road is legendary now. Those that helped build it are held in high regard. You could be among them. All you have to do is let me take your heart.”
He didn’t have to think long. He felt it within him even as she mentioned it. It felt foreign. Part of him knew that it no longer belonged to him. The moment he stepped into that Woodkin village with his axe raised he had forfeited his heart and anything else human that remained within him.
“I’ll come with you if you’ll just take it away.”
When she smiled at him he once again found himself wanting to be rid of his heart. Her smile chilled him; a chill that seemed to pierce the wretched muscle that stubbornly remained in his chest.
“We can work with that,” she said, turning her back to him and heading for the door.
He followed her out of the warehouse, thinking of what the magician had told him about purpose so long ago. And as he trailed behind the witch through the streets of Emerald City, he was very aware of the faint beating inside of his chest. He counted each one, knowing that they would be his last.
She had rescued him from the pile of bodies and told him that she needed a place in the woods cleared. She had plans on building a new cabin out there where she could marry a man and raise their children.
This had turned out to be a lie. As she lay him down on a mat in her cottage and placed several emeralds on his chest, she explained it all to him. There was a slight hesitation within him as she told her story but he fought it off. If what she said was true about the Tin Men that had helped with the construction of the Yellow Brick Road, then there was nothing to think about. He might even be able to put those missing one hundred and sixty years behind him.
“Our time is incredibly short,” she told him. “This spell should only take about an hour to work. Once your heart as been removed, I believe you will need about another hour or so to rest. Once that is done, I need you to go out onto the Yellow Brick Road and stand by the entrance to the woods. Pretend that you have rusted—like you have been there for a long time.”
“Why?”
All of the emeralds were aligned as she needed them and, ignoring him, she took a moment to close her eyes and meditate. In the corner of the room, three monkeys sat in a corner watching her. They had wings on their backs and something about the way they looked at him made Nick think of bats.
“Earlier today, something happened in Munchkinland,” the witch finally said. “I believe it was the Great Funnel Wind that did it. A house just dropped out of the sky, you see. Any other day, I’d say it was just some sort of tomfoolery put on by the Wizard to strike fear into the Munchkins.
Shadows of the Emerald City Page 6
