Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (58 page)

He cadged food from the stals on market day, which was easy enough, he told her. But when it grew too cold for outdoor market he was having a harder time of it. For a couple of weeks he’d worked as a kitchen boy in Deckens Colege, but he’d been caught trying to leave the larder with brisket in his shirtsleeves and been dismissed. Pickings had grown harder as the cold deepened. He’d taken to siphoning oats out of the feedbags of carriage horses, but the mash he could make of them was pretty indigestible. When his space downstairs had been invaded by the arrival of guests for what he’d learned was caled Visitation Day, he’d had no choice but to scarper up the stairs just around the turn at the landing. He’d heard Rain come in from the schoolyard side and start up the steps. He’d panicked and kept ahead of her, sprinting, arriving at the top level before she did. Without knowing it, Rain had cornered him by going right to the room he had found at the top of the stairs.

“But where are you
from
? Have you no home? No family? Why are you hiding?”

“Where are you from?” he countered, as if he could tel by her expression that she was as guarded as he. And while she could lie about some things, to people who didn’t figure much, she found she couldn’t lie to Tip. Neither could she break her oath to her family and put those people in jeopardy by saying anything about them. So she said nothing.

She did, however, admit that he could cal her Rain.

He spent the night on the floor beside her bed, under the horse blanket.

He slept very hard. He didn’t hear her get up and turn the coals and, finding no ember wiling to catch again, remove the venting pipe and close the hatch, for warmth. When she went back to bed she saw that Tay had moved from her mattress to the crook in Tip’s elbow. Just for an instant she wished she were Tay, but that seemed such utter nonsense that she threw herself back onto her bed again so hard she banged into the wal and hurt her nose. Neither Tip nor Tay stirred to ask her if she was al right.

Before breakfast bel, Scarly appeared with a tea towel covering four hot scones, and so the brief time in which it was just the two of them, just Tip and Rain—wel, and Tay—was already over. Rain tried not to resent Scarly standing there with her dropped jaw. Tip sat up and made to cover himself with the blanket, but since he wasn’t undressed there wasn’t much point. “Miss Rainary,” said Scarly, “en’t you cooked yourself up a pottage of mischief somehow, and no mistake.”

Rain took the scones and handed them to Tip. “Wel, now you’re ruined too, for feeding the intruder, and I’l say so if you squeal on us, Scarly. So it’s best to keep your mouth closed until we decide what we’re going to do.”

“We?” said Scarly. “Which
we
is that, I wonder?”

Rain wasn’t quite sure, but it felt a nice word to say.

Al too easily Scarly became a conspirator with special duties in menu augmentation. Tip was no fool. Wel-cooked, plentiful if simple fare, delivered almost hot from the griddle, was more appealing than cold scraps that the rats had gotten to first. Snowy aleys and colege kitchen yards had lost their lustre.

Tip settled into Rain’s room, sometimes reading there al hours if the weather was beastly, or pacing the city streets for news and exercise if the day was relatively fine. Once in a while he came back late, slipping in from the service lane through the stables. The hinges were so old that one of them had snapped, permitting a door to be angled just so, alowing to slip through any boy narrowed enough by hunger.

Once Rain asked, “What are you hunting for?”

“News, that’s al.”

“News of your family? Is that it?”

But he wouldn’t talk about his family, and neither would she. A silent compromise they’d never discussed, and usualy she remembered not to raise the subject.

This time he relented, up to a point. “I want to hear about the war.”

Rain had no interest in the war. She hardly remembered the time of the dragons on Restwater, except as an imprecise excitement that she sometimes believed she was imagining. The war had been going on as long as she could recal. It wasn’t a real thing in any useful way; it was just a condition of existence, like the forward lunge of time, and the ring of deadly sands that circled al of Oz, and the fact that cats hunted mice. “Al the war news sounds made up,” she complained. “I never saw a cannon dragged through any country lane. I never heard a gunshot from the classroom window. If there was once more ample food to be had, it was before I was able to get used to it. I hardly believe that peace and war are opposites. I think to most people they’re the same thing.”

“You’ve put your finger on a huge problem, right there,” he said. “But if you’re crossing the Wend Hardings on foot, which is the only way to cross them, and if you come across a contingent of various Animals of different sizes and abilities and temperaments who, despite their natural hostilities and exhaustion, are training together to hold the line against professional soldiers—wel, then.” He sighed, hardly wiling to sum it up. “You see more than you’d like. Battle readiness seems a bundle of smal disagreements trying to aim in a common direction against a common, larger disagreement.” She had studied a little geographics under Madame Chortlebush. “Are you teling me you came from Munchkinland?”

“I’m not teling you anything. We’re talking about the war, and how people talk about it in Shiz.”

She tried not to pry. Too much. “How
do
people talk about it in Shiz?”

“You know as wel as I do. You live here. You’ve lived here longer.”

“Yes, but.” Since he had given something away, inadvertent or not, she alowed the tiniest scrap of herself. “I’m not from here, either. So I’m not sure what I hear. Anyway, girls in school don’t talk about the war. They talk about their teachers and about boys.” She regarded Tip not in fondness but in appraisal. “They’d eat you alive.” At that comment he didn’t blush; he blanched. Rain hurried on. “War just seems to crest and crest until a checkmate is reached, and then it stays like that forever. Getting staler and staler. Nobody ever winning.”

“Until one side or the other manages a breakthrough strategy.”

“Like what?”

“Oh. Forcing the other side into bankruptcy. Or negotiating a pact with some useful third party, say. For instance, if Loyal Oz could persuade the trols to switch their alegiance, the EC Messiars would be able to invade Munchkinland through the Scalps. Those trols are pretty fearsome in battle.”

“Why don’t they then? It sounds pretty basic.”

“Because the trols under Sakkali Oafish have a deep-seated grudge against Loyal Oz dating back to a rout of Glikkuns caled the Massacre at Traum, which happened north of here. They wouldn’t unite with the Emerald City if there were only one trol left alive. They’re proud like that.”

“So if that strategy won’t work, what else might?”

“Maybe the Emperor wil die, and the pressure to continue this endless war wil lift.”

“Isn’t the Emperor divine? He can’t die.”

“I suppose time wil tel. Or one side wil discover a new weapon that’s stronger than what their enemy has.”

“Like what kind of weapon?” said Rain, as innocently as she could.

“Beats me. A great big cannon that can shoot a thousand arrows al at the same time? A poison someone can sneak into the food rations of the army cooks? An important book of magic spels that contains secrets no one has managed to unlock yet?”

“None of them sounds very likely,” said Rain.

“Who knows. The word in Shiz, since you asked, is about al these things.”

“And the word in Munchkinland?”

“Some of those same ideas. Being hoped for, anyway.”

She saw a chink. “But what are the other ideas in Munchkinland, that you don’t hear in Shiz?”

Maybe because he wouldn’t answer questions about his family, he felt obliged to answer her now. “Flying dragons would be a good idea. They were used once before by the EC, but in an attack by anarchists the Emerald City lost their stable of dragons and their expertise.”

“Dragons in Munchkinland. Imagine.”

“Few have heard of such a thing. And I’m not saying there are. Just that a lot depends on the fact that there might be. One day.”

“Are you a spy? Aren’t you a bit young to be a spy!”

“We’re al spies when we’re young, aren’t we?” She didn’t think he was being evasive. She knew what he meant. She agreed with him.

“Tel me what you find out, when you find out anything of interest,” she said. “Promise me that, Tip.”

“Spies never make promises,” he said, but now he was teasing her.

I4.

He wasn’t going to stay there forever. That much was clear. Rain just didn’t understand what conditions would prompt his departure.

She lay awake at night sometimes when Tip was asleep, out of sight, his head on the floor a foot below her head. She could hear him breathing, a faint whine in his nose that never sounded when he spoke. A distiled aroma of sour raspberries on his breath, even from this short but crucial distance. She was becoming aware of the distance between human creatures at the same time she was becoming aware of their capacity to be entwined sympatheticaly. Perhaps, she thought, this is perhaps how it usualy goes, but since she’d never been given to reflection, it seemed as if everything was breaking anew upon her at once.

Tip’s interests in current events made her listen more carefuly to what the teachers said when they thought the girls were learning off rubrics of speling or rehearsing acceptable dinner party remarks in their heads.

“Cutting the salary again, according to the magnificent Gadfry,” murmured Madame Shenshen to Madame Ginspoil one day in study hal.

“We shal be living on bread and water like the miserable armies,” replied Madame Ginspoil, helping herself to a pink marzipan pig secreted in her beaded purse. Rain thought:
Armies. Miserable. Bread and
water
. She would tel Tip.

“It’l be better though in the spring, which isn’t far off,” said Madame Shenshen. “Everyone says there wil be a new push to bring down that General Jinjuria.”

“She seems a right smart tartlet, to hold our army at bay al this time. If she’s captured, she can be dragged here and made to tutor stupid young girls,” seethed Madame Ginspoil. “Quite the suitable punishment. She can live on bread and water for what she has cost Loyal Oz in comforts.”

“The cost of war is in human lives, you mean, surely.”

“Oh, bother, of course,
that
. It goes without saying. But I have chilblains, what with the reduction of coal alotments for our quarters. Chilblains, I tel you. I have refused to knit balaclavas for the troops this year. If they can’t win the stupid war after al this time, they’l have no comfort from me. Miss Rainary, are you eavesdropping upon your elders and betters?” Rain loved to have things to tel Tip. He puzzled over them as if he were a military strategist, but Rain took this to be largely boredom. It seemed almost everyone was more interested in the progress of the war than she was.

“Does your grandfather write you letters?” Rain once asked of Miss Plumbago.

“Grandfather Cherrystone? No,” snapped Miss Plumbago. “You’d think he might. After al, he taught me to read. But he’s apparently too busy to write letters or send me little bank cheques.” He’s besieged at Haugaard’s Keep stil, thought Rain, and ventured her conclusion to Tip, who thanked her for trying but seemed to know this already.

No, it couldn’t last forever. In a couple of weeks, Madame Streetflye told them, it would be time for Rain’s class to take up Butter and Eggs. Most of the girls giggled and blushed. Rain didn’t have a clue until Scarly filed her in. Butter and Eggs was the Pertha Hils softsoap way of talking about Human Sexual Techniques: Practical Clarifications. Rain guessed that once she sat through that class, she could no longer alow herself to share a room with a boy. Neither, probably, would she want to, if she read accurately Scarly’s repertoire of expressions. Primarily scowl and disgust. What would Tip do then?

The matter resolved itself with painful swiftness. On the very day she was bringing back to Tip the latest gossip she’d heard—that men were going to be conscripted from Shiz—Proctor Gadfry Clapp was caled up to war.

The way it happened was this. Lord Manning, the Senior Overseer, had stopped to pay an unexpected cal, which was his right and privilege. Al might have gone horribly wrong, since Tip was just passing through the stables when Miss Ironish rushed in unexpectedly to give some instructions to Lord Manning’s coachman. Tip was caught between Miss Ironish entering the annex from the schoolyard side and the coachman arriving from the service entrance. Luckily, Miss Ironish took Tip for the coachman’s boy. She handed over some papers folded inside a clasped sleeve of leather, school accounts or an inventory of students or something. “Store these in Lord Manning’s pouch, young man.” Tip brought them to the horseman, who in return told Tip to ask the Cook for a few extra apples. The horses had been ridden hard on such urgent business.

Suddenly, on this risky morning, Tip became a fixture in the backstairs without anyone quite having twigged to his lack of specific sponsorship.

“Bring your man this carroty cream crumble, you,” said Cook, who by and large liked men, her several husbands ample proof of that.

“Tel your Cook this may be the best cream crumble in Shiz,” said the coachman back.

“Tel your felow to tel me something I don’t know.”

Lord Manning had had enough of hysterics. Having delivered his sorry news to Gadfry Clapp, he was in no mood to stay for a cold school luncheon. The proctor sat in marmoreal paralysis in his study, but Miss Ironish folowed Lord Manning right into the ablutorium and out again, hissing at him. (The teachers kept their doors open a crack to catch the drama.)

“I am not the Emperor of Oz, Miss Ironish,” snapped Lord Manning. “I do not order a thousand men to march to war. I scarcely order starch for my colars. I am merely implementing the diktat come directly from the Emerald City. Now
will
you spare me your tongue?”

“Would you leave us without a man in the establishment? Lord Manning! I could not hold my head up with the parents of our girls, if they learned we had left them unprotected!”