Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (72 page)

“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 folows that she isn’t there with you. But perhaps Ozma, like Nor, has passed into nothingness. She was only an infant when she was kiled. 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 Ozmists.
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 hel. You Ozmists aren’t the only filter to the Other Side,” said Dorothy staunchly, in that bulishly 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.

“Tel 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 tel me about Elphaba.”

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

Rain said, “Okay, my great-uncle Shel 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, wistfuly.
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 al 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 cal 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 puled together, as in a blackout between scenes of a theatrical piece stagehands rush on and plump the pilows. Each glowing rotting leaf on its trembling stem stood out to be counted.

Rain looked, noticed. She did not count them.

“Realy, we got precious little out of that but a chil,” said Little Daffy, rubbing her forearms. “Anyone for a pastry, to get the juices flowing again?”
I2.

The Black Elephant had regained the native strength that elephant musculature and armature alow. He was standing on al four legs in the sunlight outside, being washed with buckets of water and scrubbed toward ecstasy with long-handled brooms. The sun smeled 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.

Lir 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 Jelia Jamb pul the lad off their backs as they slavered up the water meant for Lir’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. Lir could smel that her face was more puckish, like the rosewater face of a maid over a counter of chocolates. Younger, fuler. He could smel 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 Lir, forgetting for a moment he was actualy an Elephant—roled 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 Lir had. The boy dusted himself off and said to the Wolves, “You did your job and you managed to avoid eating me. Felows, my commendations.”

“Answer me,” belowed Mombey.

“I went on a bit of a walkabout,” caled the arriviste. “I’m sorry I didn’t tel 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’l 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 Lir almost tromboned his laughter at them; but he noted Mombey’s caught breath, and he thought, She loves him so much she is unwiling 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 shal pay for your mistakes,” she said, but her voice was ful of joy; no revised countenance could disguise that. “Sir Fedric, Sir Cyrilac, you have done your duty wel. A year’s liberation from the effort of the war for you and al your kin.”

“We are a randy pair,” said Fedric, and Cyrilac 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 Cyrilac 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 other 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 al right.”

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

Lir’s nose folowed 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. Lir could smel that Tip had the brush of Rain on his lips. For the safety of the boy, in whom he could smel no honesty but no menace either, and for the safety of his daughter, Lir held his tongue, but his nose was primed for more salient information.

Had he come across this lad once before? Lir’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 Lir 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.

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

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

But he heard what the Owl said before the final shutter was puled. Lir’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. Lir heard no more from the Owl after that.

When the yard had cleared, and the maids put away their brushes, and Lir had come to accept that no one would scratch his rump again today in the way that gave him joy, he turned to look at Trism, who had remained.

“Tip?” said Lir.

“Her factotum,” said Trism.

“Her son, it must be.”

“No one knows. He was lost and he is back. This means she wil move immediately into action. The dragons are ready. The only hold against our striking earlier was whether she might inadvertently be putting him in danger, not knowing his whereabouts. If the boy is back, and secured, any remaining prohibition against an attack has been lifted. You’l be propositioned tonight. Mark my words.”

“Propositioned. Hmmm.”

“They’l ask you to confirm that the spels I’m trying to cast through the arcane language of that solitary page of the Grimmerie are accurate. They’l ask you to examine the book and refresh the spels, refine and intensify them, with any other charm that you can find. It’s why you’ve been brought here. Only your mother showed any real skil with that book; everyone else has fumbled and failed with it. Even Mombey is dubious about reading it. She wil promise you something real, and she’l keep her promise, if you help her bring down your uncle.”

“That boy knew my daughter,” said Lir.

“You must put that sort of thought aside. Perhaps you can survive long enough to be a help to your daughter again.”

“I have been no help to her at al. Ever.”

“Get ready for what they wil ask. They’l ask only once.”

“Wil you love me whatever I say?”

“No. I don’t promise that. I may have made my own choices, for my own reasons, but I won’t love you unless you make your own choices, for your own reasons. That’s the bargain of love.” A man and an Elephant, talking about love, and neither of them shamed. What a world I’ve come up through, said Lir to himself. Oh, what a world, what a world.

Trism knew about which he spoke. By the light of the jackal moon Mombey came into the garden behind Colwen Grounds, where Lir had been alowed to graze. She presented herself as a woman of gravity, with a furrowed brow and silvering hair, and she walked with a cane, but she hadn’t gone so far as to concede to a wrinkled neck. Trism walked four feet behind her, his head down, his eyes cloaked, his hands clasped, trying to be as remote as possible in the presence of an Elephant who stil loved him.

“We wil launch our attack by dawn,” La Mombey said. “Wil you help?”

“I can tel by my sight, my smel, and my hearing that my family is not here. Beyond that, I don’t know where they are,” Lir replied. “Naturaly, I can’t help you target anyplace they might be, and they might be anywhere.”

“What if I told you we know where they are? Both of them?” said La Mombey. “Your wife and your daughter? And they would be spared? What if I gave you proof? Would you help us then?”

“It doesn’t matter that your proof could be false.” He stood firm on his big Elephant feet. “You’ve also targeted places that harbor any child who is not mine, and I find no difference between them and a child who is mine.”

“With your proboscis, you can’t smel the difference between your own kin and someone foreign?” she said, laughing.

“With my proboscis,” he said, “I can smel that there is no difference. I wil not help you.”