Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (85 page)

“What are you doing?” His industry made her cross.

He looked up as if from a long distance away. His eyes were green; she’d never noticed that.

“I’m writing a treatise, maybe. A letter, anyway. To send to—to Brrr. And Ozma.”

She was insulted already. He was barging into her life, trying to make it better. It was less trouble to be abandoned. “About?”

“About. About, I guess—power. About governance. About the birds of no like feather who flew together, to make up the Conference of the Birds. About the maunts who decided to govern themselves by committee rather than by obedience to a superior. About Ozmists and their need to listen to the future as wel as to the past. I haven’t gotten it straight in my head yet.”

“You’re angling for a court position? As advisor to the Throne Minister?”

“I’m only angling to question the rationale of a court and a throne. The justice of it.”

“Writing never helped a soul to do a thing.”

“Except, maybe, to think.” He went back to work.

Rain thought he was too young to be so meditative, and his patience made her impatient.

To escape the sound of his thoughts scratching along, she stayed out in cold weather and worked on building a fieldstone wal around the asparagus patch. She remembered the polished chunk in the Chancel of the Ladyfish, with that tiny inscribed creature that seemed as much feather as horse. Maybe one day she would set out on a walkabout across Oz by herself and colect that stone. Inanimate objects were somewhat less bother than people.

She was pausing from her labors late one morning, wiping sweat from her brow despite the rime on the grass and the shelves of ice cantilevering from the shores of the lakes, when she saw a twitch of movement near the broom-tree. Ever wary of some fiend or sorcerer coming by and sniffing out the Grimmerie somehow, she moved closer to check. In the shadows of the tree she startled a serpent of sorts, who proved Serpentine when he reared up, flared his striped lapels, and addressed her.

“You don’t need to apply that heavy stone to me,” said the Snake. “I mean you no harm.”

She shifted it to her hip. “I’m afraid you’ve picked the wrong place to digest your breakfast. That tree is off bounds to you. It’s a memorial garden of sorts.”

“I’m no fool. I know what lies in this grave.”

Rain didn’t think he was being impertinent, but she had long ago lost the gift of a catholic sympathy. She’d grown up too much. “You’d better move along.”

“I recognize you, I think. I believe I may have helped your parents degreenify you. I see the spel wore off at last. Most do.” He leaned closer on one of his several dozen snake-hips. “You’re doing al right, then? You made it?”

“I’m afraid I don’t give interviews, Mr. Serpent.”

With alacrity he wound himself around the stem of the tree to get a little more height, and then dropped his head from a branch so he could be closer to her. His eyes were acid yelow, not unkind. “Quite wise. I don’t either. I find it does the likes of me no good. Everyone twists your words so.”

“Are you ready to move along?”

“Are you? Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’m merely a concerned citizen of Oz. Also I am a venerable if not downright ancient Serpent, and as such I suffer the affection for the young that afflicts the elderly.

I can tel what you hoard buried beneath this tree, Miss Oziandra Rainary Ko Osqa’ami Thropp. And as I keep my ear to the ground—little joke, that—I know something of what you’ve been through. What I can’t guess is why you don’t use the tools at your disposal to do something about it. And put down that granite cudgel while I’m talking to you. It’s distracting and not at al polite.” She put the boulder down but kept her hands and her heart clenched.

“I’m merely saying. You have the richest bloodlines for magic in al of Oz. You have the strongest instrument for change this land has ever seen. And you have your own need to answer to. There is Tip, turned into Ozma. You could turn, too. You could be Rain, or you could be—wel, I won’t name you. But you could name yourself. Why do you resist?”

“I think you’d better go.”

“If I see no future for my own offspring, I eat them,” said the Serpent. “If I didn’t eat you when I was introduced to you as an infant, why would I sink my venomous fangs into you now? You’ve done much good. You’ve helped complete Elphaba’s work, and in a way your father’s work, too. Don’t you deserve a reward? Oh come now, don’t look at me like that. What I’m bringing up is a moraly neutral proposition. You think it is purer to be one gender or the other? That it makes a difference? I know—no one listens to a Serpent. And I’l move along now, as promised. But think about it.” He passed through the grass. When she looked closer, she saw he’d left his skin behind. A green sheath. It could be made into a scabbard for a dirk. Before going back to the asparagus, she put her finger in the skin and tried to feel the magic of being a Serpent.

She asked her father for permission to leave.

“As if you need my permission,” he said calmly, with a clumsy attempt at cheer. “But what shal I say if someone comes looking for you with a message from Ozma?”

“There’s no chance of that.”

“Rain,” he said softly, “anyone who spent the better part of a century being prepubescent is going to need some time to figure out how to be grown up. It could happen.”

“Yes. And Candle might come back. And Trism too.”

He wasn’t hurt. “I leave the front door unlocked for one of them and the back door unlocked for the other. They know where I am. I’ve cherished them both, Rain, and I do stil. Whoever they are. I love both Trism and Candle. It isn’t impossible for you to love both Tip and Ozma.”

“What’s impossible,” she said, “is to know the truth inside someone else’s heart if they don’t tel you.”

He agreed with that. “Wel,
I
love you. Just in case you ever wondered. And don’t forget that I’ve spent some brief time of my life as an Elephant. They say Elephants never forget, and as I live and breathe, I’m teling you that this is true of humans no less than Elephants. Now, listen. I’m being serious, my desperate sweetheart. What about if a message arrives for you? Where shal I say you’ve gone?” She threw an arm about airily. “Oh, way up high. Over the rainbow somewhere, I guess.”

2.

In her cel, Glinda woke up with a start. The lumbago was more punishing than the incarceration, but a sense of spring had filtered al the way down the open canyon roof of Southstairs, and she caught a whiff of freshness, of arrogant possibility. Her glasses had broken a year ago. She didn’t need them anymore, not realy. She knew who was turning the door handle of her cel. She caled her name sleepily, and added,

“You wicked thing. You’ve taken your own sweet time, of course.”

3.

Elphaba’s broom, planted at Nether How and fed by the magic of the Grimmerie buried beneath it, had grown into a tree of brooms. Enough to supply a smal coven of witches. Too much to say that the breeze soughing through them al was, wel, bewitching? On a spring day of high winds, Rain broke off a broom from the treasury tree of them.

But she waited until her father was deeply asleep one night, and Iskinaary colapsed in front of the stove like a Goose brought down by buckshot, snoring. She took her father’s spade over her shoulder and went back to the tree of brooms. She said softly, “Okay, Nanny, I’m folowing in your footsteps,” and she dug up the Grimmerie. Stole it. She left the spade below the tree so her father would know what she’d done. Then she wrapped the fierce book in an oilcloth and strapped the satchel upon her back. She began by walking west across the Kels, which took her several months. She didn’t look back, not once, to see if Tip was folowing her.

By the autumn it was too cold to go on, and she spent the winter with a breakaway tribe of the Scrow, none of whom had ever heard of Elphaba Thropp or Ozma Tippetarius and who seemed unconcerned about Rain’s skin color or, indeed, her solitary pilgrimage through the Thousand Year Grasslands. Rain taught herself a bit of Scrow and tried to tel the story of Dorothy, to amuse the clan on the long tent-bound evenings when the icy winds howled, but one of the grandmothers bit her on the wrist, a sign to stop. So she stopped.

She brought out the shel once or twice, to Animals who had learned some Ozish, to itinerants the folowing spring who had wandered too far to the west and were happy to get directions back to civilization.

They nodded about it, unconcerned, unsurprised. One rather lumpy sand creature with an irritable disposition wouldn’t talk to her at al but pointed west, west. Farther west. And then dug itself into the sand and wouldn’t come out for any pleading at al.

She saw a clutch of dragon eggs in the sand once, and let them be.

Though the thought of them made her sling her leg over the broom for the first time. If she was going to hel in a handbasket, maybe she could fly there faster, get it over with.

She kept herself going by remembering the clues. The great salty marshes of Quadling Country. The huge stone wal upon which paintings of colored fish were refreshed annualy, though no such fish ever existed in any lake or river of Oz. The way the berm of Ovvels was built like a quay. The image of a shel stamped in the margins on the left-hand side of a map of Oz. The way that Lady Glinda had deciphered the Chancel of the Ladyfish as a market center of some sort. Something more than a temple, more like the seat of an empire. An empire ruled by a goddess with the tail of a fish.

Listen to what the shel says to you.

The grasslands were beginning to give way to sand, but in no particular hurry, she’d noticed. There would be miles of grass, as far as she could see from the height she was learning to achieve on her broom (which was not impressive). Then sands, in belts between grasslands, until the grasslands gave out. They caled it the endless sands, and she saw why. They rippled in waves and crests, static on clear days, fierce and active in the darkness, shifting and reshaping themselves on a nightly basis. There was no track across sands. They rewrote their own topography endlessly.

But then came another stretch of grassland, and beyond that, another swatch of desert. The world was not as definite as the few dots on any map would suggest.

Almost a year after her departure, she was living for a week in a temporary hut she’d built for herself somewhere to the west of Kvon Altar in the southwestern Vinkus. She’d come down with a cough of a sort, and was afraid that perhaps she was dying and might die but forget to notice, and so keep flying forever over alternating patches of wilderness. She gathered liquor from where it beaded up on the shel every night, she licked the dew colected there. Just enough to keep herself from parching. She didn’t think she had much time left.

She didn’t want to leave the Grimmerie lying around in the desert where some scorpion might find it and teach itself to read, as she had taught herself to read. Almost in a fever one dawn, she took the shel and nourished herself with it as best she could, and then, remembering an old life, she blew the horn once again through the broken tip.

Even Ozmists can’t survive in the desert, she thought to herself, sinking into a sleep as the sun rose. The wind blew her lean-to apart but she was too removed from reality to notice. Through the vast sky the sun threatened to burn her green skin brown and mottled. Light wriggled behind her clenched eyelids like threads of blood.

Around midday, delirious with thirst, she opened her eyes. She thought she saw a figure of bones standing nearby, looking down at her. He wore a coat made of greenery. Mountain pine, fir, holy, laurel.

Impossible life. The skeleton looked at her. He seemed to smile. Al skeletons smile. She closed her eyes and forgot about it.

Back there.

Disturbed in the middle of a moonless night by something unseen, a cock chortily hacked at the silence in a northern barnyard. A farmer threw a soup ladle at it, threateningly. The cock subsided.

In the forest of Gurniname outside Wiccasand Turning, a stand of rare bone-oak trees, famous for their centuries of barrenness without decay, burst into bloom. The blossoms glowed, not white, but a rich velvety jade with lavender margins. A gourmand hunting for truffles discovered it, and for a while painters flocked to catch the mystery on canvas. But the effect was always too startling. It looked fake.

Eventualy most of the canvases were painted over. Patrons of art preferred their bone-oak blossoms white, or dead.

Kelswater at dawn. A giant Tortoise emerged from a cleft between two stone plates nearly colapsed one upon the other. She’d lived eighty of her two hundred years in private meditation, prayer and fasting, and she was on the morning side of munch-ish. The history described in the pages of this and previous volumes had escaped her, and she it. Undeterred by such scathing ignorance she moved forward on fungoidal flippers, and her rust red horny beak scratched at the air. The light leaching over the horizon snagged and puled upon ripples of water fletching the lake. Smal circles as if from invisible drops of rain puckered the surface. The Tortoise remembered. She knew the commotion was the morning activity of swarmgits upon water, and that where swarmgits could skate in buggy congress of a fine morning, a hungry carp or a lake terch wouldn’t be far behind.

And—and this Kelswater. The dead lake. But she did not comment.

That’s the way it looked to plants and animals. Somewhere else in Oz—the province, the town doesn’t matter—a prissy and adenoidal tutor straight out of Three Queens Colege had taken a position to hector local schoolchildren into their letters and morals. Intending to set an early example of the mercy of discipline, he arrived in the schoolroom with a smal box made of closemeshed wire. “Approach and regard,” he said to the boys and girls in his thral. “We must be wary of the natural world, learn from its habits of violence and self-interest, and tame it so it may survive. This morning upon my hearth I found an insect of a sort never known before in Oz. I studied entomology and lepidoptery under Professor Finix at Three Queens, so I claim some wide experience with bugs. I say this is an aberration of an existing species—