The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “Yes. General Jinjuria had lured Cherrystone in Haugaard’s Keep but forgot to figure in the cost of keeping him under siege there. She can’t knock him out of Haugaard’s Keep; it’s said to be so well fortified that he has imported a barge full of dancing girls and a craps game that goes on all night. He’s running a fucking resort there on Restwater. He keeps Jinjuria guessing and occupied. And she can’t rush what’s left of her forces up to the Fallows. Something’s got to give, and soon.”

  “So you’ll use the dragons to attack Haugaard’s Keep.”

  “If you can help, we’ll use the dragons to attack the Emerald City.”

  He had said it. Liir turned his head and looked at Trism with the other eye, to see if his first eye had missed something. “There are civilians in the Emerald City.”

  “There are civilians in both armies, too. At least they were civilians before they were drafted. Look, if we can strike against the Emerald City hard enough, we might be able to pull Cherrystone and his floating vacationers out of Haugaard’s Keep; they would be recalled to defend the Emperor. Munchkinland could retake Restwater and offer a truce. How many civilians’ lives will have been saved then?”

  “A lot of ifs, I suppose.”

  “With your great schnoz, can you smell possibility in this plan?”

  It was a shame to say that he could. So he didn’t say it. He just looked at Trism. They had both grown old enough to have learned how to ignore the needs of individual lives for the purported good of the lives of nations.

  Trism knew him still; he saw what Liir was thinking; he threw himself against where Liir’s arms would be if Liir had had arms; Liir wrapped the shattered stranger in his trunk and held his best beloved tight.

  11.

  Perhaps they ought to have followed Temper Bailey’s advice, because the track they chose to wander along faltered and lost itself in a small but confounding wood. The leaves were beginning to change, the lavender of pearlfruit and the red of red maple and the gold of golden maple. The tarnishy tang of fox musk under the jealous snout of the jackal moon, who wanted to be down there with them—it was all a glorious adventure. But they were lost and doing no one much good.

  “We’ll find our way out tomorrow,” said Dorothy. “I think there’s some song about that. There ought to be.”

  The next morning they woke up even more lost. A bank of fog canted from the warmish earth into the chilling air, rather thicker than what they might have expected at this time of year. It wasn’t only visibility that gave out, but also sound. Stifled. A clammy tightness seemed to filter through the lower branches, as if the air was congested. Any leaves much above head level dissolved into a pale ruddy glow.

  “You stay close to me, Tay,” said Rain.

  “Shall we sing to keep up our nerve?” asked Dorothy. No one bothered to reply.

  Then Brrr paused and said, “I know what this is. Or I think I do.”

  He had spoken so seldom recently that they were all surprised. They waited for him to continue.

  “I saw this once before, this trick of atmospherics. When I was hardly more than a cub. I think this is the Ozmists. But what are they doing so far south? We can’t have wandered off course so badly that we missed Shiz and entered the Great Gillikin Forest? That’s where they live, as I understood it.”

  “Not a chance,” said Mr. Boss, who of them all had traveled the widest in Oz, and for the longest time. “We’d’ve had to cross the rail line to the Pertha Hills, and we never did. So we’re still west of the forest and west of Shiz. Though whether we’re heading south still or have veered some other way I can’t say in this swamp of wet tissues. Anyhow, I never heard of any Ozmists. Who are they? The essence of royalists gone to ground, literally, and their appetite for the crown seeping up?”

  Brrr spoke with more urgency than he’d shown for weeks. From this new danger, a new capacity for governance. “Listen. If something comes over us—everyone—listen carefully. You must not ask them any questions if you don’t have something to tell them in return.”

  “But Ozmists,” demanded Rain. “We don’t know about them.”

  “They’re particles of ghosts, I think,” hurried the Lion, “ghosts who can’t congeal into anything like the individuals they once were. Fragments of rotted leaves in a puddle never coalesce into living leaves again. Listen, once I saw a friend lose his way in life by forgetting to give them news. You see, the Ozmists exist—it’s not living, but it is existing, I guess—for their future. Their future, which is our present. They hunger to learn what they couldn’t know in life—and they might answer a question if we chose to ask it. But our question can’t be about now, for they are dead and don’t know now. Now is what they’re hungry for. Our question must be about something in the past that they might have knowledge of—this is important, pay attention! Or you’ll pay too steep a price.”

  They heard the tremor in his voice; it was their old Lion, forceful and worried for them, herding them together. They gathered into a circle, and even as he spoke a cloud of sparks seemed to shimmer with its own fulguration, an orgy of lightning bugs packed into a space the size of a stable.

  “Hang on,” said Brrr. His voice sounded far away to them though he was right there; they were all right there.

  They hung more than stood in a void not like the world. For a while they couldn’t see their feet or paws or hands, just their profiles, like dolmens rendered flat and brooding by soft weather.

  Then the Ozmists greeted their audience, just as the Lion remembered it, in one voice, though indistinctly. The way a single head can have a thousand overlapping shadowy profiles if a thousand candles are placed about it. Barter, chuntered the Ozmists.

  The companions waited for Brrr to answer for them. Would he have the courage? It took a moment. Or a week.

  “I know about barter,” replied Brrr. “What do you want to know?”

  Is Ozma returned to the throne of Oz?

  “She is not,” said the Lion.

  “Not as far as we know,” said Little Daffy. “I mean, we haven’t had news of the Emerald City”—she heard the Lion fake a cough and she amended her statement in time—“not the Emerald City, of course; but we know that Munchkinland is fighting strong to remain independent, holding the line at Haugaard’s Keep, holding the line at the Madeleines, keeping faith with the Glikkuns to the north, and sweeping the poison sand off their thresholds at the desert back door.”

  The Ozmists seemed to take a few moments to absorb this considerable punch of news. Where is Ozma? they answered.

  “It’s our turn to ask a question,” said Brrr. Rain tugged at his mane to quiet him, but he wouldn’t be silenced. “Where is Nor?”

  “No, Brrr, don’t,” whispered Mr. Boss. “Don’t do that.” But the question had been asked.

  The Lion waited as the lights spiraled, not unlike the waltz of corpuscles that sometimes trickle across the surface of the eye.

  “Where is Nor?” asked Brrr again, more firmly still. “I know how this works. I’ve been here before. We’ve answered your question. Now you answer ours. You can’t hold out on us.”

  There is nothing of Nor here, came the reply.

  “She isn’t dead? But of course she’s dead,” murmured Little Daffy.

  We consist only of the appetites that would not die, the Ozmists churned. There was nothing of her left that wanted to know more. This is how it is with some deaths. We know little more about where her spirit is than we know about the lives of the living. We are caught in the middle by our lust for answers. We are the part of Oz’s past that cannot give up its hope for the present. That is all.

  “Since you ask about Ozma,” said Rain, “then it follows that she isn’t there with you. But perhaps Ozma, like Nor, has passed into nothingness. She was only an infant when she was killed. She could have no appetite for the present; she was too young to know the difference between past and present and time to come.”

  She never passed through us, said the Ozmis
ts. It is believed here that she has not died.

  “She’d be a thousand and eighty,” said Little Daffy wonderingly.

  “No one is that old, except Nanny,” said Rain.

  “Baby Ozma might have taken an omnibus to hell. You Ozmists aren’t the only filter to the Other Side,” said Dorothy staunchly, in that bullishly public voice she sometimes had.

  If there could be said to be a pause in a hissle of ghostly fragments, there was a pause.

  “What happened to my parents, then?” asked Dorothy. “If you’re so comprehensive? They died at sea, in a boat going to the old country. It sunk, and that was that. Where are they? What did they want to know about me? I don’t believe you have a thing to say about it.”

  The Ozmists had nothing to say about it. Neither, noticed Brrr, did they pester Dorothy for news. Perhaps they didn’t want to know about the Other Side that Dorothy hailed from. Even ghosts have their limits of tolerance.

  “Tell us about Elphaba,” said Rain.

  Barter, said the Ozmists, a sense of relief in their voices.

  “The head of St. Prowd’s, Proctor Gadfry, has gone for a soldier.”

  That’s of no significance to us.

  “It is to him, and it’s his history,” said Rain. “Unless he’s died and is with you now, it’s as significant as anything else. The history of this war hinges on what every single person alive chooses to do or not to do. Now tell me about Elphaba.”

  Still they resisted. Clangingly, silent-noisily, dark-lightly.

  Rain said, “Okay, my great-uncle Shell is Throne Minister of Oz. He is Elphaba’s brother. That’s current events, up to the minute. But we can’t find out what happened to Elphaba Thropp, my grandmother, once Dorothy threw a pail of mucky water at her. She’s been dead and gone almost twenty years, I’m told. Why is there no evidence of it?”

  When the Ozmists spoke, they were cautious, even a little apologetic.

  In all of history, of most human lives, there is no proof of passage, they said, neither coming in nor going out. Don’t be offended if someone you love has left no trace. That doesn’t mean they were absent in their own time.

  “So you’re going to be coy about it too?” asked Rain. “Figures. Useless phantoms.”

  You think that someone with the capacity of Elphaba Thropp would let us gossip about her, even if she were here in our midst? In life she paid no attention to the rules of the game. In death she’d not suddenly go corporate.

  “So she’s not dead? Or is she?” asked Rain. But this they wouldn’t answer.

  You strayed at the stand of four beeches, several miles back, they said, relenting.

  “I don’t remember four beeches,” said the Lion.

  We’ve been moving while we’ve been congregating. Ghosts can’t keep still. You won’t find the beeches again. But keep the stream on your left and you’ll soon be on the right track.

  “And what track is that?” asked Dorothy.

  To the future, they said, wistfully. And, you? With the shell?

  “Yes,” said Rain.

  Blow it once, they said.

  She did. It had almost no sound in this cloaking paleness, but the Ozmists took on a glow like that of lights in water, a wetter look. A blueness, as of heat lightning.

  If you need us, blow the horn for us, they said. We will come if we can.

  “Why would you do that? I’ve given nothing to you. It’s all about barter, isn’t it?

  You give news even when you don’t open your mouth. What you’ve given to us is for us to know. It is enough. There is no balance due.

  “Hey, what about Toto?” Dorothy thought to call out. “Is he a phantom dog now, romping about with you?” But the Ozmists were lifting and would not reply.

  The world they left behind—the commonplace world of now—felt a little more tightly pulled together, as in a blackout between scenes of a theatrical piece stagehands rush on and plump the pillows. Each glowing rotting leaf on its trembling stem stood out to be counted.

  Rain looked, noticed. She did not count them.

  “Really, we got precious little out of that but a chill,” said Little Daffy, rubbing her forearms. “Anyone for a pastry, to get the juices flowing again?”

  12.

  The Black Elephant had regained the native strength that elephant musculature and armature allow. He was standing on all four legs in the sunlight outside, being washed with buckets of water and scrubbed toward ecstasy with long-handled brooms. The sun smelled of everything in the entire cosmos. His eyes were closed and the water was paradise, was better than air in his lungs and beetles in his bowels. But his ears heard the commotion when a boy was escorted into the yard. The newcomer was tied and bound and laid on the back of two yoked Wolves running in tandem.

  Liir didn’t think he was intended to see this miscreant’s arrival, but the Wolves were thirsty for water after their hard run, and they made straight for the buckets from which the Elephant minders were working. And Wolves have little regard for hierarchy even when the hierarchy is La Mombey. They let foot soldiers and garden boys and Jellia Jamb pull the lad off their backs as they slavered up the water meant for Liir’s capacious backside. The Elephant trumpeted in their faces but they paid him no mind. Not the first ones to do so.

  La Mombey came out on a balcony above him. Liir could smell that her face was more puckish, like the rosewater face of a maid over a counter of chocolates. Younger, fuller. He could smell the pink in her cheeks, augmented by powdered sugar mixed with dust of sun-dried and pummeled red grape that had come into season four and a half weeks ago, on the sunnier side of some slope fed by iron-rich aquifers. Oh, to have a nose.

  “You dare to come back?” shouted Mombey. “Or you are fool enough to be entrapped? Answer me, don’t make me stand here waiting.”

  The boy—half boy, half man, like the rest of us, thought Liir, forgetting for a moment he was actually an Elephant—rolled onto his knees and stood up with an enviable elasticity. Ah, to be young, too. Though maybe the lad had been treated relatively better than Liir had. The boy dusted himself off and said to the Wolves, “You did your job and you managed to avoid eating me. Fellows, my commendations.”

  “Answer me,” bellowed Mombey.

  “I went on a bit of a walkabout,” called the arriviste. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, and I hope I haven’t made trouble. I was on my way back to accept my sentence already when your Wolves recognized me and insisted on ushering me home. Find a prison deep enough for me, a chore too hard to survive, and I’ll endure it for as long as I can. I’ve learned I have no place out there without you, and I accept my punishment as the price of what I’ve learned.”

  A stinking bouquet of lies, and Liir almost tromboned his laughter at them; but he noted Mombey’s caught breath, and he thought, She loves him so much she is unwilling to believe he might be lying. Smart as she is, she can’t see a lie from this kid.

  “You had me frantic,” said Mombey. “I thought you’d been kidnapped so someone could barter with me for your release.”

  “Who would kidnap your boot boy?” His voice was innocent but scornful. “Would you kidnap someone just to get advantage?”

  “You shall pay for your mistakes,” she said, but her voice was full of joy; no revised countenance could disguise that. “Sir Fedric, Sir Cyrillac, you have done your duty well. A year’s liberation from the effort of the war for you and all your kin.”

  “We are a randy pair,” said Fedric, and Cyrillac nodded. “We are related to every Wolf in your army.”

  “Then a year’s liberation for you and your wives and cubs, and let that be enough.”

  “Thank you, Your Eminence,” said Fedric, and Cyrillac added, “We are not of a monogamous bent, and we have between us married every female we know and sired every cub younger than we are.”

  “It’s the wolf in us,” said Sir Fedric, modestly and without shame.

  “Then a year’s liberation for you two alone, and if you make any o
ther conditions, a year’s incarceration for dragging this conversation out.”

  The Wolves nodded and skulked away like dogs that have been scolded.

  “Tip, come up here,” said Mombey. “Come into the house and let me see that you are all right.”

  “Hi, Tip,” whispered Jellia Jamb, waving one hand and biting a nail on the other.

  Liir’s nose followed the boy as he made his progress to a flight of stone steps on which the servants were spreading spittlegreek and lavender to dry upon an oilcloth. Liir could smell that Tip had the brush of Rain on his lips. For the safety of the boy, in whom he could smell no honesty but no menace either, and for the safety of his daughter, Liir held his tongue, but his nose was primed for more salient information. Had he come across this lad once before? Liir’s nose had a better memory than his brain.

  As Tip was succumbing to Mombey’s embrace, Trism appeared from around the conservatory. He noticed—for he was no fool—the rapt attention that Liir the Elephant was paying to this reunion. Before Trism could say anything, though, before the yard could clear, an Owl flew down from the corner of the building and landed clumsily on the drying lavender, clouding the air with the scent of old ladies’ water closets.

  “Abysmally bad timing,” said Mombey to the Owl. “I’ll take no report out here in the open.”

  “As you wish, my liegitrice,” said the Owl. A more obsequious creature Liir had never met, either as Elephant or man.

  But he heard what the Owl said before the final shutter was pulled. Liir’s nose might be more magnificent but his ears were also as large as palmetto fans. “I found her on a road west of Shiz, but I lost her in a sudden and puzzling fog. When it lifted, I studied the road to which I had directed them, where your spidery agents were waiting to apprehend them. But somehow the travelers slipped through the unseasonable weather, and I lost—”

  “Indeed you did,” Mombey said, and there was a sound of something not quite a whip, not quite a mousetrap, but something iron and deadly. Liir heard no more from the Owl after that.