Out of Oz, Page 54

  Had I to stay another day

  I’d lose my fucking mind…

  Over the roar of the water they couldn’t hear any more after that, and were grateful for it.

  8.

  The corpse of the Black Elephant was hauled through the porte cochere of Colwen Grounds and around to the back. Here the ground sloped away, allowing access to some whitewashed stables, clean to clinical standards. All had gone according to plan so far. Various Munchkinlanders helped drag the cart into a stall with a bricked barrel vault ceiling, also white. They kept this place in fine fettle, but that was what Munchkinlanders were like.

  Its formal name was Parliament House, though since no parliament had ever been convened everyone still called it Colwen Grounds. The ancestral home of the Thropp family, the place old Nanny had started out in domestic service as Cattery Spunge, late of the spindlemills. Back when she was young Nanny. Or young enough. When she’d been engaged to help raise Melena Thropp, the randy and irresponsible mother of Elphaba, Nessarose, and Shell, now Emperor of Oz.

  No one from the Thropp line was here to see Liir return to his birthright at last. And maybe for the best. The humiliation of being a prisoner. What would Liir’s ancestor Eminence, Peerless Thropp, have made of this?

  Taking it for a genuine corpse, the palace staff began to prepare the pyre. But La Mombey herself descended into the basements—they’d never known her to do that before—and required the corpse to be rolled over. The book in its sack wasn’t appreciably squished, and she grabbed it with both hands.

  “Shall we continue our preparations to burn the corpse?” asked the grounds overseer.

  Mombey said, “Do you smell the stench of death?”

  “I don’t know what the stench of death is for a Black Elephant.”

  “Believe me, you’d know if you smelled it. Hold the torches. It might pull through.”

  “Can I take that for you, Your Highness?” asked her handmaid.

  Mombey said, “Jellia Jamb, I can carry my own books to school, thank you very much. Don’t you ever touch this one.” She took the book in her arms and stalked away with it. The handmaid shrugged and made a face at the farm overseer. You never knew what Mombey was going to say or do; she was a different woman every hour of the day.

  Not so different from the rest of the race of women, though, thought the overseer.

  9.

  At this point in the early autumn, the waters of the Gillikin River had fallen. Fording the great broad flat was almost a picnic. They were ahead of the seasonal rains by two or three weeks, maybe.

  It felt good to be going somewhere again. Maybe I’m just a wanderbug, thought Rain. Everyone I care about most in the world is off and in trouble, and I’m noodling along on the road as if it’s my job.

  Tay looked at her almost as if it could read her mind, accusatorily. Everyone you most care about? Hello?

  Well, not everyone, she thought. Come here, you. And she carried Tay a stretch.

  She remembered the marking stone that had shown a fork in the road, but she wasn’t sure that she had crossed the Gillikin River at the same place where she and Tip had done those weeks ago. Still, after they passed through a couple of fairly prosperous town centers and some dustier cousins, too, they came to a sarcen on which directions were painted, with arrows. Sitting on top of the stone was an Owl.

  “Which way now?” asked Dorothy to the Owl.

  “Depends, I suppose, on where you want to go.”

  “Out of Oz, and the sooner the better,” said Dorothy, and then she recognized the voice. “Why, it’s Temper Bailey. What are you doing here?”

  “Relocated after my professional humiliation.”

  Little Daffy said, “Oh, that was a rigged case if ever I saw one. You never should have taken it on.”

  “I was required under pain of caging.”

  “And you’re now a Loyal Ozian?” asked Dorothy. “Have you no patriotism toward Munchkinland?”

  “None.”

  That seemed to be that. “Well, we’re headed toward the Emerald City,” said Rain.

  “If you stay on this road, you’re too far north. You’ll eventually end up in Shiz.”

  “No, thank you,” said Rain. “I might be tempted to kidnap Miss Plumbago and hold her for ransom until I get my father back, and I don’t want to stoop to their tactics.”

  “Then turn around and find the crossroads in the village you just quit. Take the left road out of town, the one by the ironmonger. That’ll bring you to a high road that joins up with the Yellow Brick Road.”

  “You’ve done me a service again, as you did once before,” said Dorothy. “Will you come with us to the Emerald City?”

  The Owl scuffled his talons. “You’re going there again? Are you in complete denial ? You’ve picked the wrong support group with this lot. Or what, are you going to ask the Wizard to grant you your heart’s desire?”

  Dorothy took no offense. “Well, I’ve come to see you have a point. Concentrating on getting your own heart’s desire is myopic at best. Or just plain selfish. But there isn’t any Wizard anymore, is there? He hasn’t made a comeback?”

  “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.”

  I0.

  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 door-frames 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 smell. 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 prese
rved 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.