Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (70 page)

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

Mombey said, “Do you smel 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 smeled it. Hold the torches. It might pul through.”

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

Mombey said, “Jelia 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 Gilikin River had falen. 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?

Wel, 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 Gilikin River at the same place where she and Tip had done those weeks ago. Stil, 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. “Wel, we’re headed toward the Emerald City,” said Rain.

“If you stay on this road, you’re too far north. You’l eventualy 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 vilage you just quit. Take the left road out of town, the one by the ironmonger. That’l bring you to a high road that joins up with the Yelow Brick Road.”

“You’ve done me a service again, as you did once before,” said Dorothy. “Wil 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. “Wel, 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 wel and my pelets 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 al 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 caled 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’l find another shortcut through to the Yelow Brick Road. If we accidentaly detour to Shiz, wel, maybe some good wil come of it. Maybe we’l find they’ve taken my father there instead of to the Emerald City, for some reason. We can always take the train, or folow the Shiz Road to the EC. If we need to.”

“You’re stil 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 smel.

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 al, 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 tel the separate ages of the wood from different pieces of furniture and from the doorframes; he could even tel it was furniture and door-frames before he opened his eyes. He knew about the mothbals 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 tel 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 fela?” The doctor pushed a cart with a bucket of wel water too rich in the riskier algae, but fresh this hour, and Lir drank it gratefuly 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.

Lir 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 taler 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, Lir Thropp,” she told him. “I am La Mombey Impeccata, the Eminence of Munchkinland. I should like you to sit up now and pul yourself together.” He thought about it, and then heaved himself over by roling back and forth like an old dog. Under the low table on which he rested, the newly instaled 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 smel 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 smel 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 wil 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 wil fal. The fewer Animals wil 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 ful 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 al, 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 smel her dress whispering comments of straw brushing along the slate. The soap that had not been rinsed out wel four washings ago. He could smel her anger and her cunning.

What he couldn’t smel—and, if he’d ever realy been a human man, he didn’t recal having been able to smel 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 al too often. There was that.

At the door, she said, “I know about you. Not as much as I wil, 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 spel. Who do you think she first turned to, al 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 al of Oz. Go up against me, Lir, and you wil 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 al this time he might meet up with Elphaba Thropp again, his so-caled 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 smeled time passing as he slept, and learned as he slept to smel it in minutes and hours as wel as in warmths and darknesses.

Then he was stronger, and more Lir, more aware of himself as the old Lir inside the Elephant skin, though a changed Lir in ways he stil couldn’t smel. There’s a reason we live in time. We are too smal a flask, even as an Elephant, to tolerate too much knowing. Instead, truth must drip through us as through a pipette, to alow 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, Jelia Jamb? Or La Mombey herself? If La Mombey, could he smel 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 smeled, so he roled over and turned his head. His eyes were the least strong of his senses so far, but he strained to focus as wel 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 Lir’s part, though maybe on Trism’s. “Is it you, or is it another of her tricks?” asked the Elephant’s old lover.

Lir might have asked the same, if Mombey had used a semblance of Trism to trick Lir into a confidence, but his nose was strong enough to tel this was Trism, no disguise. He remembered the smel of every folicle root, every breath, every fold and crevice, every secretion and hesitation. The sight and the knowledge took Lir’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 actualy 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 Lir’s waving trunk, which was raking in ten years’ worth of nasal history, satisfying the longing Lir 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. Stil, he’d maintained his military trim, a strong stomach and tight waist, and his bearing was al 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 folowed you to that farm—”

“Apple Press Farm.”

“I remember its name. You weren’t there. After al that.”

Al that might have happened with or against Candle, al that she had never told Lir about, never spoken about.

After al this time, though, here stood Trism. If Candle had preserved her feelings for Trism as her own secret, Lir found he had uncovered new reserves of patience to let those feelings remain unknown.