Brrr raised his eyebrows to the child, and she understood; she galloped toward him and sprang onto the Lion’s back. “Don’t get used to me,” he found himself saying over his shoulder. “I’m no one’s defender. I’m not reliable.” Her finger dug into the rolls of skin at the nape of his neck and she nuzzled her face in his mane. This made her cough. He wished he’d given himself a shampoo more recently, but conveniences were in short supply in the Pine Barrens. Another reason to detest the place.
They’d stashed the Clock at the dead end of an old logging road; above this, the hills mounded to a lookout. Brrr didn’t wait for Ilianora, the dwarf, his boys. He vaulted ahead, passing the Clock, breasting the hill.
The sun was just beginning to set. The stripe of glare down the lake, too bright to see at first, pinned the flotilla within it. Then the Lion’s sight steadied, and Rain’s must have too. The girl murmured, “Holy Ozma.”
They saw four ships and six impossible dragons encased in a floating belt of ice, a flat island of white. Ice had run up the ratlines and shrouds and stiffened the sails into glass. Men had shucked their uniforms in the summer heat and jumped onto the floe. In little but braies and singlets they were hacking with axes. Here and there campfires had been set, as if to puncture the ice with melt-holes. The dragons bellowed!—you could hear it even at this distance. One or two had worked a wing loose. The military were staying clear of the twisting, snakelike heads, which snarled and snapped in rage at everything and nothing.
“They din’t do nothin’,” said Rain. “T’ent their fault, them beasties.”
“Fell in with the wrong crowd,” said Brrr, “and they’ll pay. Mind who you choose for friends, Rain.”
“Friends,” snorted the girl, skeptical of the concept, maybe.
Out from Sedney and Bigelow to the south, from Haventhur and Zimmerstorm to the north, Munchkin boats were emerging. Shabby little barks such as had been snugged into port or tucked under screens of pine branches proved trim and ready for this opportunity for sabotage. Twelve, fifteen, twenty vessels. Compared to the mighty ships Cherrystone’s men had built, these were laughable toyfloats. Powered by forearm and sail and cheery, puffing steampipes. Here came a bark shaped like a gilded swan—that must be from one of the ancestral piles farther up the lake.
“High holy hysteria,” said Mr. Boss, arriving with the others in time to see the Munchkinlanders take revenge for the burning of their crops.
The dragons were making so much noise, down below, that the soldiers seemed slow to comprehend the net of lake midges drawing around them.
“Brrr, turn around, take the girl away from this,” said Ilianora suddenly.
“This is the world in which she has been born,” barked the dwarf. “Better to know early. Take a good look, girlie.”
Ilianora came up beside Brrr and reached for one of Rain’s hands; Rain shrugged her away. She didn’t take her eyes off the lake.
“The local riffraff is ready with muskets of some sort,” said Brrr, as punches of thready smoke also bloomed out around the raggle-taggle peasant fleet. It wasn’t long before columns of cloud smeared the air from the gunnels of The Vinkus, the Munchkinland, the Gillikin, the Quadling Country. A hearty response from professional artillery.
Perhaps the kickback of Cherrystone’s cannon began to shatter the ice. The rocking worked some play into the frozen girdle, and the navy Menaciers seemed encouraged. But soon it became clear that the Munchkinlanders were united in a simple strategy. Spare the ships; attack the creatures. The slaughter of one dragon, then a second and third simultaneously, made all the onlookers, even Mr. Boss, catch his breath. The great dragon-heads fell to one side, old sunflowers listing. The dragon-wings burst into thin flame, translucent first, then oranged, rouged; they fell to ash within minutes.
“Ow,” said Brrr. “You’re hurting me, Rain.”
The fourth dragon died. The fifth broke loose in the commotion, at last, and rose above the fray so high that the company on the bluff drew back, ready to scatter should its eye fall upon them. But it dove upon one of Cherrystone’s ships to snap the stubbed mast. Then it whirled about and attacked the gilt-tipped swan boat. It caught the silly hooped neck of the prow and rose in the air with it, dashing it upon one of the frozen ships. Brrr couldn’t see if the swan’s navigator or skipper had dived to safety.
The liberated dragon dropped from the air again. At first they thought it was attacking another ship, but the dragon was heaving in a death throe. In the muck of ice floes and floundering vessels, it overfreighted one of Cherrystone’s vessels to the starboard side, and the ship upended with a sound of suction and shattering, stove through.
The sixth and final dragon managed to rip free, now that the spell was losing its grip. Into the sky it racked its way. Taking no notice of floating armies or vengeful ambushers, it staggered in the sunset light. Crazed perhaps. It turned to the south, heaving over Bigelow and the foothills of the Great Kells. Heading for the Disappointments, maybe, or the murk of the badlands. None of its band would follow it into Quadling Country. It had no living mates left.
2.
After soaking a puck of congealed tadmuck and mashing it up, the company of the Clock of the Time Dragon disported itself about a small fire of coals to cook their penance and eat it. They were silent at first. The smoke kept the jiggering mosquitoes off, but the light drew the moths. Cross-legged on the ground, Rain cupped her chin in her hands. Her eyes followed the mauve wings. As if she’d never seen moths before, Brrr thought. Or perhaps she was contemplating the kinship possibilities between moth and dragon.
“Not to ruin anyone’s digestion,” said Brrr at last, “but we’re probably marked enemies of the administration lording it up in the Emerald City. Ilianora and I were talking and—well, don’t you think we should scram while we can?”
“I don’t work by committee, never did,” snapped Mr. Boss. “I want your sympathy, you faggoty cat, I’ll ask for it. You can go foul your knickers for all I care.”
“What’s the matter? Some mountain goat nibble at your testicles?”
Ilianora shot Brrr a look and indicated the child. But Rain continued oblivious to anything but the flutter of moth and flame, and Brrr kept at the dwarf. “What is it? You don’t like anyone else making a decision? Such as our taking on the girl when Lady Glinda suggested it?”
Mr. Boss had been kind to Ilianora for the past year. She had always before been able to cozen the dwarf from his tempers. Now, when she sat down near him and put a hand on his knee, he swatted it away. “You want somebody more functional than Sissyboy Lion, help yourself to one of the lads. I’m not interested in you.”
Behind the dwarf’s back, Brrr mouthed singsongingly to his wife, You’re i-in trou-ble.
“We’ll only keep the girl till we can find somewhere safe for her to stay,” she said to the dwarf. “We more or less promised Lady Glinda. In exchange for releasing the book back to us.”
Mr. Boss flicked a piece of ratty bark into the fire, taking out one of the moths. Rain gasped, quietly.
“We got your precious book,” said Brrr, trying not to sound panicky. “The girl is a bonus. What’re we waiting around for?”
“I don’t know. How the hell should I know?” Mr. Boss’s tone was darker than usual.
“Ask the Clock?” suggested Ilianora, as if that thought might not have occurred to him.
“I can’t.”
Brrr had only been with the company of the Clock for the past six months. Still, he’d heard that the Clock decided for itself when it needed a rest. When this happened, the company would sometimes disband for a while. Maybe it was time. The Lion asked, “What, is the thing on strike again? Holding out on us?”
Mr. Boss shifted this way and that without answering. Off to one side, to the plinks from a silver guitar and a set of jingle-tongs, the bawd came through clearly. The seven lads were improvising more lewd verses to their nightly lay of the endless lay. Some evenings the boys sang of themselves
taking their pleasures in a whorehouse, sometimes in a female seminary, sometimes in front of an audience of kings and bishops. The boys were equally godlike in endurance and readiness, the girls indistinguishably gorgeous except for variations in hair color. Hardly lullabye material, but soon enough Rain slumped in the Lion’s forearms and noodled herself toward sleep.
“Now,” said the Lion, “I don’t mean to rush you, but assassins are no doubt starting out to find us, the Clock, and the book. They’ll have put it all together, given we showed them an excerpt of what to expect. Do you want to tell us what’s going on?”
Mr. Boss sighed, and a single golden tear slid out of his eye and lost itself in his bottlebrush mustache. Brrr didn’t trust the tear of a dwarf any more than he trusted the Unnamed God to appear in the clearing and settle the universal contest of good versus evil. Or even good versus bad taste.
Ilianora extended their chieftain the benefit of the doubt. “What’s upset you? It surely can’t be the child?”
The dwarf sunk his chin farther into his chest, as if he’d rather speak to his lap. “I hoped getting the book back from Lady Glinda would refresh the Clock’s executive function, but I don’t believe it has done so.”
Ilianora and Brrr exchanged glances, and waited.
“You always see the entertainment message of the Clock,” explained Mr. Boss. “That’s all anyone ever sees. The audience side with the stages, the apertures and balconies and suchlike. But there’s a difference between public demonstration and private revelation. Around the corner? Not the side with the storage cabinets, but the back end of the cart? Where the placard says HE DREAMS YOU UP AND SWALLOWS YOU DOWN? That advertisement hides from everyone’s view a private stage you never saw because I never mentioned it. To anyone. When I’m alone I go sneak a look there. I watch for direction every few days. Even if the Clock prefers to show no opinion about what might happen, always before this it has quivered with secrecy. It’s been like a child trying to keep perfectly still. Can’t be done. No one can play dead dead enough, not even a Clock. Until now. It gave me one more tirade while you were gone, today. Then—it died. It’s mastered the art of being dead. Or comatose.”
“What did the Clock say?” asked Ilianora.
“It said keep away from any grubby underage girlykins who have no business mucking with history.” He tossed his brow toward Rain but couldn’t bring himself to look at her. “And then it collapsed.”
The lads were settling down into their usual mound. They always slept apart from management. Rain was lost into a dream of her own.
“Perhaps the Clock needs the Grimmerie to function properly?” suggested Brrr. “Like a kind of yeast, or a key? Maybe now that we have it back…?”
“More often than not, the book has been clear of the Clock, and still the Clock told me whatever it needed me to know. The Clock and the book are separate systems, though sharing a cousinly interest in influence.”
“Then maybe the Clock doesn’t like having the Grimmerie back,” said Brrr. “Maybe you should hot-potato it back to Lady Glinda’s lap.” He wouldn’t relish being delegated for that mission, not in the current climate.
“Right. And maybe the stars are really the toenail cuttings of the Unnamed God. Don’t talk about that which you don’t bloody get, Sir Pussykit.”
So even history can get tired too, thought Brrr. How many futures has the Clock told in its time? It’s been humping around Oz for what, thirty, forty, fifty years now? And the dwarf slaving in attendance to it except during the periods when the Clock was hidden in some crevice of Oz, and the dwarf could go out and live something of a life? “Well, if you can’t start it up with a hand crank, maybe it wants to be dead,” said Brrr. “Ever think of that?”
The dwarf only groaned. “The Clock isn’t just a font of prophecy. It’s—a kind of conscience, I think.”
“It won’t be the first conscience ever nodded off. I’m joining it. Good night.”
But the Lion’s rest was pestered by the calls of hootch-owls and the slither of pelican beetles under dried pine needles. He was worried that the dwarf seemed immobilized by the Clock’s paralysis. He was worried they shouldn’t be sleeping here, but should be on the road already, getting away. He could hear marksmen in every scrape and shudder of forest.
Always some itch that worrying couldn’t scratch. Brrr slipped sideways in and out of the kind of sleep that masquerades neatly as the actual moment—is he a Lion aware of being almost asleep in a summery pine forest, or is he dreaming of that same reality?
Apparitions of his past detached from the fretwork of chronology and drifted into consciousness, out again. The Lion swam in that underwater wonderland where action and consequence lose their grip on each other.
Look who’s here on conscience’s catwalk: striking poses between wakefulness and dream.
The nobleman who’d thought up for the Lion an agent’s assignment. The man who had smelled of licorice and tobacco. Avaric, Margreave of Tenmeadows. His thin pumpkin-colored mustache and goatee, that bearing few Animals could imitate. Damn the confidence of the titled!
Avaric gave way to Jemmsy, the first human Brrr could remember meeting—a humble soldier of the Wizard of Oz. The Lion’s first friend, so his first betrayal. What made Brrr think he could care for a little girl, even for a while? Doing damage—that was the Lion’s métier.
Jemmsy flew apart into ashes. In the Lion’s hypnogogic paralysis, Jemmsy resembled the swarm of Ozmists, said to be fragments of ghost who haunted the Great Gillikin Forest. What had they asked? “Tell us if the Wizard is still ruling Oz.” And Cubbins, the boy-sheriff of the Northern Bears, had asked them a return question: “Tell us if Ozma is alive.”
Why didn’t hooded phantasms in their sepulchral moan ever ask, “Tell us if salted butter is better than unsalted in a recipe for a Shiz mincemeat pasty?” Prophetic questions and answers only cared about rules—powers, thrones, pushiness.
Cubbins faded away into a pattern of sedges and paisleys. Brrr was nearly asleep, and then a thought of the ancient oracle known as Yackle intruded upon the artsiness of the mind yielding to dream.
She was so robust in his thoughts that he sat bolt upright. That cunning fiend! In his mind she was more demanding than ever. “Take care of the girl,” she’d hectored him not six months ago. “I need you to stand for her, if she needs standing for.” She’d been talking about the child of Liir and Candle. None other than Elphaba’s granddaughter. But was this girl who showed up—Rain—the right one? The Clock seemed leery of her, according to the dwarf. And Brrr couldn’t be sure. He lay down again. Behind his closed eyelids, as the girl stretched and rubbed against his spine and rolled over, he tried to imagine her as green, though in daylight she seemed the same filmy milkweed color of so many Munchkinlanders and Gillikinese.
Clocks are color-blind, thought Brrr. Let the Clock recover its spring and go back to being the conscience of Oz. It can sort out Rain’s reality. I’m too tired.
All his previous disasters danced attendance upon him now, a big lousy finish. That nightly inquisition, as character relievedly dissolves into oblivion: Who are you really? The Lion had a wife with whom he didn’t sleep, not only for the problem of incompatible proportions but because Ilianora was stitched into a finalizing virginity. The Lion had fixated on many humans and Animals alike, and loved only one, Muhlama H’aekeem, an Ivory Tiger. That had gone nowhere in a hurry. Had he sired litters? No. His part in the Matter of Dorothy and the death of the Wicked Witch of the West was puzzling to all, himself included—was he an enemy of the state? Or a hero of the nation? Or just an empty space in the world wearing an acceptably impressive mane—that was how he accounted for himself, up and down and be done with it.
So maybe he wasn’t capable, he concluded, of fulfilling Yackle’s request of him. “Take care of the girl.” Why should he? Elphaba had done him no favors, unless you believed those who said he’d been a Lion cub in Shiz, and she and her friends had rescued him from s
ome unsavory experiment in a lab. No way to prove it, of course.
But here was Rain, in her sleep, rudely scratching herself between her buttocks. The Lion could feel the girl’s spindly arm. His spine and hers, back to back.
But why wasn’t he capable? Come on. Lady Glinda had looked after Rain without drawing attention to the matter. And face it, Lady Glinda was hardly Old Mother Glee from the operettas. If Glinda could manage, couldn’t Brrr? With Ilianora’s help? With or without the dwarf’s help, the Clock’s advice?
But the Clock had gone somnolent, Brrr remembered. A conscience in a coma.
But but but. The endless clockwork spin of self-doubt.
He had come to no conclusion in his roundabout reflections. Sleep rescued him temporarily from the obligation to fret about it any longer.
3.
The new others were still asleep. Rain picked her way around them: the white-haired woman with the hard-soft face, the goldeny Lion, the little mean man. Also the seven acolytes of the Clock, who were tickling one another in their sleep, she thought.
She didn’t miss Glinda. She didn’t miss Puggles. She half expected Miss Murth to be lurking under the pines with a face flannel at the ready, but when Murthy didn’t show up Rain pushed on. She was intent on climbing back up to the lookout to see what could still be seen of the dragons in the water.
Her mind for a path was clever enough. The light rowed like slanted oars along the way, showing her how to go. It felt good to be out in the world. Not dangerous at all, no matter what Miss Murth had kept saying, especially lately.
Ah, the lake. At this hour its surface steamed black-silver. Green glowed on the hills. Green painted the southern coves like a skin of algae. She noticed smoke above Zimmerstorm, though she was too young to wonder if it signified the remains of a town burned in reprisal. She couldn’t see the mansard roofs of Mockbeggar Hall, and she didn’t think to look for them.
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