“Quiet, you, or I’ll cook that little boy instead,” he answered.
She tried to raise with Oatsie the notion of firing the cook, but Oatsie would not listen. “We’re coming in to Kumbricia’s Pass,” she said, “my mind is on other matters.”
They couldn’t help but feel the unsettling eroticism of the landscape. From the eastern approach, the Kumbricia Pass looked like a woman lying on her back, her legs spread apart, welcoming them.
Up in the slopes, the pine boughs shaded the sun, the wild pears tangled their twisted branches together as if wrestling. A sudden dampness, a new private climate—the bark ran wet, the air sank heavily against the skin like half-laundered toweling. Once inside the forest, the travelers could not see the hills. Everything smelled of ferns and fiddle greens. And on the shores of a small lake stood a dead tree. It harbored a community of bees, at their work of chamber music and honey.
“I want to take them with us,” said Elphie. “I’ll talk to them and see if they’ll come.”
There had been bees in the kitchen garden at Crage Hall, and again at the Cloister of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows. Elphie was entranced by them. But Liir was terrified, and the cook threatened to disappear and leave the group traumatized by an inability to do a really top-notch bechamel sauce in the wilderness. Discussion was waged. An old man in the party, heading westward to die because of some midnight vision, ventured as to how a little honey would improve the tasteless sparrowleaf tea. A Glikkun mail-order bride agreed. Oatsie, of sentimental enthusiasms when least expected, voted for honey. So Elphie climbed the tree and talked to the bees, and they came along in a swarm, but most travelers stayed in the other wagons, suddenly scared of every fleck of dust that flitted against the skin.
They sent out a request, using drums and mist, to attract the attention of a hired rafiqi, for caravans were not allowed to move through the lands of different Vinkus tribes without a guide to negotiate permissions and fees. Bored one evening, and responding to the gloom, the travelers fell to discussing the legend of the Kumbric Witch. Who comes first, the Fairy Queen Lurline or the Kumbric Witch?
Igo, the sick old man, quoted the Oziad, and reminded them all of how creation worked: the Dragon of Time created the sun and the moon, and Lurline cursed them and said that their children wouldn’t know their own parents, and then the Kumbric Witch came along and the flood, the battle, the spilling of evil in the world.
Oatsie Manglehand disagreed. She said, “You old fools, the Oziad is just a frilly, romantic poem of older, harsher legends. What lives in folk memory is truer than how some artsy poet says it. In folk memory evil always predates good.”
“Can this be true?” asked Igo, with interest.
“Surely there is the handful of nursery märchen that start, ‘Once in the middle of a forest lived an old witch’ or ‘The devil was out walking one day and met a child,’” said Oatsie, who was showing that she had some education as well as grit. “To the grim poor there need be no pour quoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her—is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is at the very least a question of definitions.”
“It certainly is true that tales of the Kumbric Witch abound,” agreed Igo. “Every other witch is just a shadow, a daughter, a sister, a decadent descendant; the Kumbric Witch is the model further back than which it seems impossible to go.”
Elphie remembered the ambiguous scroll painting of the Kumbric Witch—was it she?—found in the library of Three Queens, that summer long ago: standing in shiny shoes, straddling a continent, nursing or choking a beast.
“I don’t believe in the Kumbric Witch, even in Kumbricia’s Pass,” boasted the cook.
“You don’t believe in Rabbits either,” snarled Elphie, suddenly annoyed. “The question is, does the Kumbric Witch believe in you?”
“Temper,” sang out Oatsie, and turned it into a singalong song. Elphie stamped away. This was too much like her childhood, discussions with her father and Nessarose about where evil begins. As if one could ever know! Her father used to orchestrate proofs about evil as a way of persuading his flock to convert. Elphie had come to think, back in Shiz, that as women wore cologne, men wore proofs: to secure their own sense of themselves, and thus to be attractive. But surely evil was beyond proof, just as the Kumbric Witch was beyond the grasp of knowable history?
2
The rafiqi arrived, a thin, balding man with battle scars. There might be trouble from the Yunamata this year, he told them. “The caravan comes after a season of dirty forays by cavalry from the Emerald City. Winkie roundup,” he complained. It wasn’t clear if he was talking about a local argument over a drunken slight to a Vinkus maiden or about a slave trade and resettlement camps.
The camp was broken, the lake left behind, and the silent forest continued for a half a day. Sunlight speared through the canopy from time to time, but it was a thin, egg yolk light, and seemed always to be off to the side, never spotlighting down on the path ahead. It was eerie, as if Kumbricia herself were moving along beside them, hidden, unbidden, passing from tree to tree, sliding behind rocks, waiting in shadowy depths, watching and listening. The ailing old man wailed nasally, and prayed to emerge from this mystery wood before he died, or his spirit might never find its way out. The boy wept like a girl. The cook wrung the neck of a chicken.
Even the bees stopped humming.
In the middle of the night the cook disappeared. There was consternation among all except Elphie, who didn’t care. Was it a kidnapping, or a sleepwalking episode, or a suicide? Were the angry Yunamata near, and watching? Was it Kumbricia herself taking revenge on them for discussing her so glibly? There were many opinions, and the breakfast eggs were runny and inedible.
Killyjoy did not notice the cook’s disappearance. He snuggled, grinning in his coma-sleep, closer to Liir.
The bees went into some sort of mysterious hibernation inside the joint of tree trunk brought along to make them happy. Killyjoy, still smarting from grite poison, slept twenty-two hours a day. The travelers, afraid of being overheard, stopped talking altogether.
Toward the evening the pines at last began to thin, and the forest to shift to stag-head oak, which with its broader branches let in more of the sky—a pasty yellow sky, but at last a sky—and then there was a cliff edge. They had climbed higher than anyone had quite realized; beneath and beyond stretched the rest of Kumbricia’s Pass, a journey of four or five days. Beyond that was the beginning of the Thousand Year Grasslands.
No one was sorry for the light and room that the sky afforded. Even Elphie felt her heart lift, unexpectedly.
In the middle of the night the Yunamata arrived. They brought gifts of dried fruit and sang tribal songs, and made those who would dance get up and dance. The travelers were more terrified of their hospitality than of the attack that they had expected.
As Elphie thought about it, the Yunamata seemed soft, compliant folk, only as fearful and fearless as schoolgirls—at least that was all they showed. They were cavorting, opinionated; they reminded her of the Quadlings with whom she had grown up. Perhaps ethnically they were distant cousins. Long lashes. Narrow elbows. Babylike supple wrists. Oblong heads and thin concentrated lips—even with their foreign tongue they made her feel at home.
The Yunamata left in the morning, complaining rudely about the runniness of the breakfast eggs. The rafiqi said that the Yunamata would make no further trouble. Even he seemed disappointed, as if his employment hadn’t been required.
There was no word about the cook. The Yunamata didn’t seem to know anything about him.
As the caravan continued its descent, the sky opened up again, brisk and autumnal, wide as remorse. From there to there!—the eye could hardly take it in. The plain below, compared to the mountains, seemed level as a lake. The wind made strokes across it, as if spelling th
ings in a language of curls and stripes. No wildlife was visible from this distance, though there were tribal fires here and there. Kumbricia’s Pass was left behind, or nearly.
Then a Yunamata messenger came on swift leathery feet, arriving from the Pass behind them, to share the news that a body had been found at the base of a cliff. Perhaps it was the cook; it was thought to be a man, but the surface of the corpse was so swollen with lesions that the particulars were lost. “It was the bees,” said someone, full of rage.
“Oh, was it?” came Elphie’s calm voice. “They’ve been asleep for so long. Wouldn’t there have been screams if they’d attacked a man in the middle of the night? Did the bees sting his throat first, to swell his vocal cords shut? Very talented bees, those.”
“It was the bees,” was the mutter, and the implication was clear. You too.
“Oh, I forgot the size of the human imagination,” Elphie said meanly. “How very large it is, after all.”
But she wasn’t upset, not really. For Killyjoy was back to himself, at last, and the bees woke up too. Perhaps the high altitudes at the top of the Kumbricia Pass had given them such sleep. Elphie began to prefer their company to the rest of the travelers. As they woke up, coming down from the heights, she felt herself more and more awake, too.
The rafiqi pointed out on the horizon several mounding coils of smoke. At first the travelers guessed they were windstorms, but Oatsie soothed them and alarmed them: It was evening fires for a large encampment. Scrow. It was autumn hunting season, though nothing had been seen of any game bigger than a hare or a grass fox (its brush a wild swipe of bronze on melting golden meadow, its feet in black stockings like a serving maid’s). Killyjoy was ecstatic with the possibilities of encounter; he could hardly bear to rest at night. Even in his dreams he twitched with the hunt.
The travelers feared the Scrow more than they had the Yunamata. The rafiqi did not say much to allay their fears. He was more tentative than it had first seemed; perhaps the job of negotiating among suspicious peoples required caution. Liir idolized him hopelessly, after only a few days of travel. Elphie thought: Such silly things, children—and so embarrassing—because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something. While animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.
She felt in herself a jolt of pleasurable expectation over the thought of approaching the Scrow. Along with so much else, she had forgotten what pleasurable expectation was. As night fell, everyone seemed more alert, out of fear and excitement. The skies throbbed with turquoise, even at midnight. Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into a hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing.
If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, it might be the best way to die.
3
It was noon when the caravan pulled up to the edge of the Scrow camp. A committee of Scrow had ridden to their domestic margin, where the sand-colored tents petered out into untrampled grass—men and women alike sat on horseback, about seven or eight of them, in blue ribbons and ivory bangles. Also, obviously senior, was a huge slab of an old woman carried in a palanquin of some sort, its frame all hung round with tambours and clinking amulets and gauzy veils. She let the rafiqi and the tribal paladins trade compliments or insults. After a while she grunted a direction and her curtains were withdrawn so she could see. She had an overhung lip, so large that it doubled back on itself like an upside-down spout on a pitcher. Her eyes were ringed with kohl. On her shoulders sat two dyspeptic-looking crows. Their feet were shackled in gold links and attached to loops in her ornamental collar, into which the old woman had dribbled traces of the fruit she had been eating as she waited. Her shoulders were speckled with crow droppings.
“The Princess Nastoya,” said the rafiqi at last.
She was the filthiest, least-educated princess anyone had ever seen, yet she had some dignity; even the most ardent democrat among the travelers genuflected. She laughed raucously. Then she bade her bearers lug her away to someplace less tedious.
The Scrow camp was arranged in concentric circles, with the Princess’s tent in the middle, prettied up with extensions of faded striped baldaquins on all sides. It was a little airy palace in silks and cotton muslin. Her advisors and concubine-husbands seemed to live in the nearest circle (and a scrawny lot the husbands were, thought Elphie, but perhaps they were chosen for timidity and scrawniness, to make her seem ever the larger). Beyond the Princess’s settlement ranged four hundred tents, which meant maybe a thousand people altogether. A thousand humans, with their poached-salmon skin, their moistly protruding eyes (but sensitive, in lowered gazes, to avoid being met), their handsome generous noses, and big buttocks, and wide rolling hips, men and women alike.
Most of the caravan travelers stayed glued to the doors of their wagons, imagining crime just beyond the nearest tent. But Elphie found it impossible to keep still, with all this newness beckoning. When Elphie walked, there were gasps, and the adults shyly retreated out of her path. But only ten minutes had passed before there were sixty children in a noisy crowd, following behind, running ahead, like a cloud of midges.
The rafiqi advised caution, advised return to the camp; but childhood in the Quadling badlands had made Elphaba not only bold, but curious. There were more ways to live than the ones given by one’s superiors.
After the evening meal, a delegation of erect old Scrow dignitaries approached the Grasstrail Train and entered into a lengthy palaver with the rafiqi. In the end, the rafiqi translated the message: a small band was invited—requested—(ordered?)—to the Scrow shrine. It would take an hour by camel. For her sin of skin color, presumably, or possibly for having had the nerve to take a solitary stroll through the Scrow tent city, Elphie was told to join Oatsie, the rafiqi, Igo for his venerable age, and one of the financial adventurers—named Pinchweed, or maybe that was just a nasty nickname.
By the light of sallowwood torches, the camels, in glittering caparisons, lurched and lumbered on a worn track. It was like going up and down a staircase at the same time. Elphie sat above the grass, a vantage point over the great flickering surface. Although the ocean was only an idea sprung out of mythology, she could almost see where it came from—there were small grasshawks launching themselves like fish leaping out of the spume, nipping at the fireflies, pocketing them, then falling back in a dry splash. Bats passed, making a guttering, sputtering sound that ended in an extinguishing swoop. The plain itself seemed to bring forth night color: now a heliotrope, now a bronzy green, now a dun color skeined through with red and silver. The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar. Nothing more need have happened; it seemed enough to Elphaba to find herself capable of such a weird ecstatic response to soft color and safe space. But no, on—on.
Eventually Elphie noticed a plantation of trees, carefully tended in this devastating openness. First a stand of scrub spruce, contorted by the winds into gnarled figures of split bark and hissing needles—and the pagan odor of sap. Beyond, a rise of higher hedges, then, yet higher trees. It was the circular pattern of the Scrow encampment again. The party passed into it in silence, as through a maze, along curving corridors of whispering brush, moving from outer to inner circles lit by oil lamps hammered to carven posts.
Within, at the center, was the Princess Nastoya girded in a native costume of leather and grass made all the more effective by a length of striped purple and white toweling she must have bargained from some traveler or other. She stood, distracted and breathing heavily, leaning on stout walking sticks; around her, sarsen stones like gapped teeth resembled a stone cage through which she could hardly pass, given her bulk.
The guests joined the hosts in eating, drinking, and smoking on a pipe with a bowl carved like a crow’s head. Crows ranged all around on the tops of the sarsens, twenty, thirty, forty? Elphie’s head spun, the moon rose, the plain at night, invi
sible from the secret garden of the green maze, wheeled about like a child’s top. She could almost hear the spinning. The Scrow elders chanted in a drone.
When the drone died out, the Princess Nastoya raised her head.
The huge wattles of old flesh beneath her small chin wobbled. Her toweling fell to the ground. She was naked and old and strong; what had seemed like boredom was revealed as patience, memory, control. She shook the very hair off her head and it uncoiled down her back and disappeared. Her feet moved massively, as if seeking the best purchase, like columns, like pillars of stone. She dropped her arms forward and her back was a dome; still her head was up, her eyes the brighter, her nose working mightily; she was an Elephant.
An Elephant goddess, Elphie thought, her mind recoiling in terror and delight, but the Princess Nastoya said, “No.” She spoke through the rafiqi still; he had obviously seen this before, though with the alcohol he stuttered and had to search for words.
One by one she asked the intentions of the travelers.
“Money and commerce,” said Pinchweed, shocked into honesty: money and commerce and pillage and plunder at whatever cost.
“A place to die where I can rest, and my spirit go abroad,” ventured Igo.
“Safety and movement, out of harm’s way,” said Oatsie spunkily, by which it was clear she meant: out of men’s way.
The rafiqi indicated that Elphie’s own answer was still needed.
In the presence of such an Animal, Elphie could not stay aloof. So she spoke it as best as she could. “To retire from the world after making sure of the safety of the survivors of my lover. To face his widow, Sarima, in guilt and responsibility, and then to remove myself from the darkening world.”
The Elephant told the others, except the rafiqi, to leave.
The Elephant raised her trunk and sniffed the wind. Her rheumy old eyes blinked slowly and her ears moved back and forth, raking the air for nuance. She pissed hugely in a steaming flow, with dignity and nonchalance, eyes firmly latched on Elphaba.
The Wicked Years Complete Collection Page 28
