Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (48 page)

A cheer went up. “This could turn into a riot,” muttered Mr. Boss to his companions. “I always enjoy a good riot.”

“We came to do a job, and we’l see it through,” said Brrr, hoping he meant it. He glanced at Little Daffy to see how she was faring. She nodded that she was firm.

“And on up to the Madeleines,” continued Dame Fegg. “That rank of soft mountains to our west, dividing us from Gilikin. The longest stretch of unprotected border of Munchkinland, an easy bolster, nothing more, along whose slopes the clouds rol toward us, furnishing us with the rain that makes us the Corn Basket of Oz, nothing less. Productive Munchkinland, that part most of us know best—the soft roling lavender fields, the farmsteads lit with cheery lamplight of an evening, the harvest festivals, the local traditions of long tables set out on vilage greens. The beer—yes, let us defend our right to brew hops!” Another big cheer at this.

“Al of it—al of our way of life, treasured bequest of those who went before—al of it threatened by invaders. I give you Miss Dorothy,” she said, playing to the crowd rather than the jury. “Miss Dorothy Gale, a young woman unreliable in her memories of how she came first to Oz to commit regicide against the ruling family of our motherland, our Munchkinland.” Later, Brrr swore he heard someone from behind a door sound a note on a pitch pipe, but perhaps cynicism was getting the better of him. Someone in the crowd began to sing what the Lion had come to know as Munchkinland’s anthem.

Munchkinland, our motherland,

No other land is home.

We cherish best this land so blessed

As pretty as a poem.

We’ll never rest when from the west

By rude oppressors we’re oppressed.

We proudly stand with Munchkinland,

Our treasure chest, our humble nest,

Our motherland, no other land

Is home.

Brrr cast a glance to the front. Even Temper Bailey was singing—to keep mum was probably considered sedition. The cheering that folowed could probably be heard al the way to Kanziz. Not good, the Lion thought. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see those Chimps come out with tankards of ale to sozzle the mood further.

Dame Fegg wiped her eyes. “And so, from the heartland of Oz, from the capital city of our Free State of Munchkinland, do I put it to the jury one final time. Dorothy Gale’s testimony about her youth and innocence in her prior sojourn in Oz can’t be considered admissible, as that very youth made her an unreliable witness to the events of the times. Nonetheless, in this country everyone must pay for what crimes they commit, and nobody can adequately defend Dorothy against the crime of murder of Elphaba Thropp. By extension one deduces that the accused’s aims were coherent, her capacity to assassinate our leaders honed to surgical precision, and her disguise as gulible sweetheart on a walking tour entirely convincing to those morons with whom she came in touch.”

“I object,” caled Little Daffy. Mr. Boss looked at her sideways with a clenched lower lip, dubious but approving. His little Munchkinlander spitfire. “I may have been young and dressed as a daffodil, but I was no moron.”

“You aren’t counsel. You have no right to object,” said Lord Nipp.

“I should think that’s exactly the kind of right we are trying to defend in Munchkinland,” said Little Daffy. Brrr found he wasn’t so surprised at her brass. Purportedly she had spent a decade or so chafing under the direction of her former coleague Sister Doctor. She’s not shy, our Little Daffy.

“Counsel Bailey,” said Lord Nipp. “Have you anything to add?”

The Owl had come to court in native dress, which is to say naked. This was a risky gambit, Brrr thought, but who knows? It set him apart from the Munchkinlander prosecutor, who had returned to her stool and was blowing her nose with sentiment and force. Temper Bailey flew to a perch provided him halfway between the jury and Dorothy, who was sitting upright, back ramrod straight, eyes open too wide.

“I assert that my client, Miss Dorothy Gale from abroad somewhere, must be innocent of the charges of murder and assassination,” said Temper Bailey. “For one thing, while it is true that her arrival coincided with the death of Nessarose Thropp, there’s no way to prove that Nessarose didn’t look up into the heavens at the sight of a smal house lurching through the clouds and have a heart attack from terror, faling down dead on the platform just before the house of Dorothy landed. I took advantage of our unscheduled recess to fly to Center Munch and search the coronor’s records. While Nessarose was conclusively determined to be dead, the cause of death is not mentioned.”

“Wel, I doubt coroners are trained to identify the cause of every possible fatality in this universe,” said Lord Nipp. “Cause of death: Colapse of Real Estate? Please. Point dismissed.”

“Nonetheless, we must deal with the facts legaly as we find them,” said Temper Bailey. “In any case, if we accept Counsel Fegg’s conclusion that Dorothy Gale is an unreliable witness to her own actions, we must also therefore strike from the record Dorothy’s observation that the Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba Thropp, actualy died.”

“Preposterous,” said Dame Fegg. “Al of Oz knows that she died at the hands of this witch.”

“If you please, I am not a witch,” said Dorothy. She mimed tying a bonnet under her chin “I’ve been trying to make this point for some time, but you people here never seem to
put on your listening caps
.”

“I propose to the jury,” said Temper Bailey, “that of the charges brought against the defendant, we must strike them both off the chart of crimes.”

“Wait; we can get the coroner in here to testify what he saw,” said Lord Nipp.

“The coroner is dead, my Lord. So al we have are his records. May I close by saying that we’ve heard no conclusive evidence that the defendant committed the crimes with which she is charged? Here in loyal Munchkinland, even as we struggled against the encroachments of the Emerald City barbarians to our west, we must remember that what we are defending is not only the golden treasury of our arable fields and our native customs. We are defending our own honor, too. And we wil not convict someone for whom there is no evidence of wrongdoing.”

“Now I’ve heard everything,” snapped Dame Fegg. “I suppose as a coda you’re going to propose that due to the contradiction in time schemes, that the defendant before us is not even the actual Dorothy Gale who was here eighteen years ago, but an impostor?”

“Oh, I’m me, al right,” said Dorothy earnestly.

“I haven’t given you the floor,” said Lord Nipp.

“Oh, but Your Reasonableness, may I have a word? Please?”

Brrr could see that Nipp was inclined to say no, but the crowd wanted to hear Dorothy speak. They rhubarbed away in an insistent manner. Maybe the magistrate was stuck between his formal obligations and his own curiosity. If so, his curiosity won. He waved her forward.

Dorothy stood up for the first time. She towered over the Munchkinlanders, even Lord Nipp on his stool. “When I first came to Oz however many years ago we count it, I was merely ten,” she said. “I don’t know if in Munchkinland a child of ten can be convicted of murder, but I believe in fairness, and I think you do too. When the twister lifted my house from its foundations, and I went whirling off in the skies, I was as helpless as a flea on the hide of a dog. I knew nothing of Munchkinland or anything about Oz, and I don’t see how I can be convicted of murder of a Wicked Witch whose presence I wasn’t even aware of until her corpse was pointed out to me by Lady Glinda.”

This was, perhaps, not a sound association for Dorothy to make, thought Brrr; Lady Glinda seemed to be persona non grata both in Loyal Oz and in Munchkinland. You couldn’t win.

“I’ve been fed newspapers in my jail cel—and a very comfortable jail cel it is, I might add. I have seen this trial referred to over and over as ‘The Judgment of Dorothy.’ With al due respect to my estimable hosts, today I would like to interpret that phrase as ‘Dorothy’s Judgment on the Matter.’ And so before you deliver your verdict, dear honorable jury and magistrate, I would like to deliver mine.”

“Entirely out of order,” said Nipp, sorry he’d let this cat out of the bag, but the crowd was straining to hear what Dorothy would say next.

“When I first came to Oz as an untraveled farmgirl,” she went on, “everything seemed magical to me. It took some getting used to, the presence of witches and wizards, and talking Animals, to say nothing of a Scarecrow who could walk and a man hammered with tin. It made Kansas look very tame. When I got home a few months later, thanks to the magic shoes that had caused so many problems, everything appeared pale by comparison. I thought maybe I’d somehow made the whole thing up. But then Uncle Henry and Auntie Em showed me a whole new house with a real indoor washroom instead of an outhouse, bought with insurance, and I hadn’t made
that
up. Plumbing is uniquely persuasive. So I decided my trip to Oz had been real, even if no one in Kansas believed in you.” She looked at them. “Yes. No one believed in Munchkinland. They thought I was being fanciful or perhaps tetched in the head. But
I
never stopped believing in you. I never stopped believing in the Yelow Brick Road, and the Emerald City, and that frightening old humbug, the Wizard of Oz.”

She paused. She wasn’t quite as good as Dame Fegg, thought Brrr, but she had strengths of her own. “Here I stand now, before the very people I pledged never to forget, only to be accused by them of murders I didn’t intend to commit. I’m older now, as we’ve discussed. And I’ve traveled a little bit since I was ten. Uncle Henry took me by train al across the great mountains in my land to the city by the bay—

to San Francisco—and for al that I have seen, the Rocky Mountains that, no offense intended, rival the magnificent Scalps in stature and purity—the great fertile plains of Nebraska—the ocean beyond the bay

—I haven’t seen anything that could deflect my memories of Munchkinland and Oz. Not yet, not ever. My judgment of you is that you are a kind people and a fair people, and you wil do what is right. You wil make for me more memories of charity and justice that I can carry home, if I can ever reckon how to manage the return trip.” She curtseyed at Lord Nipp and again at Dame Fegg, and then she curtseyed a third time, not to the jury but to the crowd in Neale House. A smal spattering of applause, quickly repressed.

“Mmm, she’s good,” murmured Mr. Boss. “This should be rich.”

“I shal liberate the jury to its deliberations,” began Nipp, but then Dame Fegg stood up.

“There is a matter I meant to folow and I have just remembered,” she said. “May I be alowed to ask a question?” Nipp nodded. “I wonder if Miss Dorothy could describe for those of us who know nothing about Sanfran Tsitsko, or however it is said, the sea you mentioned once or twice. What sea is this?”

“Oh, goodness,” said Dorothy. “It’s caled the Pacific Ocean. It is as wide as the sky, and as broad.”

“Poetic license is inadmissible in court,” said Dame Fegg. “Nothing could be as wide as the sky. The sky goes to both sides of us, you see, whereas a landscape to be viewed can only go in one direction.”

“You’re right, in a manner of speaking,” said Dorothy, “but you see, this sea is so broad that you can’t view the other side. It’s said to stretch as far as Asia, and to take many, many days to cross by boat.

Once you are out in a sailing vessel or a steamer, you lose sight of the land, of California and al, and there’s nothing around you but water. The sea is as wide as the sky, exactly so, for the water, I am told, stretches under you and the sky above, in precisely identical proportions…”

“That’l do,” said Dame Fegg. Munchkinlanders were vomiting into their lunch sacks. “You describe a mystical sea that bears no resemblance to reality. I hold you are criminaly insane.”

“Just because you’ve never seen an ocean doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” said Dorothy. “The same way that, when I go home,
if
I get home, your existence is not obliterated just because none of my family has ever been to Munchkinland.”

Dame Fegg said, “I have heard enough, Lord Nipp. I think you can send the jury out.”

“The presence or absence of an ocean of the mind has no bearing on this case!” hooted Temper Bailey.

“Are there any final remarks?” asked Nipp, picking up his gavel. He pointed at Brrr, who shrank back. But Little Daffy stood up and approached the table.

“I want to thank you for hearing my testimony, sir,” she said. “As the only Munchkinlander present who witnessed the arrival of Dorothy, I’m grateful to have been welcomed into the proceedings. It’s a custom of Center Munch to conclude a disagreement or a negotiation with a sweet, to show that honorable people can agree to disagree and stil be courteous. So I have baked a little present for you.” No one could argue with Little Daffy; none of the Munchkinlanders from Bright Lettins knew the customs of Center Munch. She puled from a basket on her arm a checkered cloth and unfolded it. “Please, in the name of those Munchkinlanders who remember Nessarose Thropp, accept this offering in the spirit in which I give it.”

Nipp took a little pastry between thumb and forefinger. Dame Fegg did the same. Temper Bailey, using his claws on his perch, declined an offering. “May I approach the defendant?” asked Little Daffy. “It’s the custom. ‘With special zest we greet the guest,’ ” she intoned daringly. “Or is that verse peculiar to Center Munch?”

“If you must,” said Nipp. Little Daffy angled the basket and shifted the napkin so Dorothy could see inside better.

“Take two, they’re smal, and you’re a big girl,” said Little Daffy, and Dorothy obliged. Then Nipp instructed the jury to file out to a private chamber.

“I wouldn’t go far,” said Nipp, “if you want to be present at the declaration of the verdict. I have a feeling this isn’t going to take a long time. We’l convene again in an hour and I’l let you know if a decision has been reached.”

9.

They walked enough apart from the crowds to be able to talk. “This trial is a wholesale farrago of justice,” said Mr. Boss. “Not that I care much for justice, one way or the other. But even so. Your offer of defense, Brrr, hasn’t amounted to much. She’s dead meat, our little Giddy Girl Gale. Cooked and sliced and served on a party platter.”