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Before they could return to their chairs to continue, a bell rang in the mauntery. The glass cat slept on. “It is time for prayers before dinner,” said Yackle. “Shall we take a break now?”
“You’re going to pray?” he asked.
“I remember the old ways of this place. I’m going to find a cleaver and trim these pesky nails, for one thing. Then I’m going to sit in a chapel among people who pray,” she replied. “You may have a writ from the Emerald City, but I suspect it doesn’t require me to reveal the metes and bounds of my religious doubt.”
He shrugged again. “Will you join me?” she said, aggressively.
“We have hardly started,” he said. “You’ve told me about meeting the Nanny, and how you came to learn about the Thropps. That’s just scratching the surface. Tell me something more about that Elphaba—the Wicked Witch—before you go. For all I know you’ll be assumed bodily into the Afterlife at the end of prayers tonight.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” she replied and headed for the door.
Then she turned. “The Nanny had come for advice about her employer, about that Melena Thropp—the mother of Elphaba and, eventually, the mother of Nessarose and our current benighted Emperor of Oz, Shell, too. I supplied her with something, some pinlobble leaves cut with milkflower or something. I don’t even remember. Useful, though hardly magical. I never met Melena or her husband the minister. I never met Nessarose or Shell. And that Elphaba—that green girl!—well, we know what happened to her. I was on hand for bits and pieces of that, too.”
“Go on,” he said.
“I’m out of here,” she said, scraping her hand in the air, hunting for the doorknob. “But don’t you see what I’m saying? I had had my first genuine vision, even if it was induced. Something about possibility. All that misty apprehension, those swirls of image trying to form into something intelligible…in all that, I perceived force and hope alike. And I saw that I would be a real oracle, whatever kind of oracle I could manage to be. My calling wasn’t just a joke.”
“Elphaba’s tools of the trade,” he urged her. “The broom. The crystal ball. And wasn’t there a book, some book of magic?”
She wasn’t taking the bait. “The elixir had awakened in me the potential to read for meaning. I would read for meaning. It’s as simple as that. You see, I had been waiting for something to focus my attention. I needed to find something in order to sense a meaning to my life, in this earthly prison of Oz. Maybe I was like the orphan duckling who has to find a friendly dog or a hen or something that might serve as a surrogate mother.”
“Take it from me,” said Brrr, “not everyone who is devoid of a mother seeks out a surrogate.”
“Tell it to the judge,” she replied and left the room.
Like many a blind person, her spatial memory seemed keen. She creaked and tottered away toward the chapel. He listened to the hem of her winding sheet whispering along the floorboards.
It would be fun to hear the scream of some young novice who hadn’t yet heard the news that Yackle had risen from the nearly dead. All he could hear, though, was the arpeggios of melody in the oakhair trees.
NOT MANY MILES to the south, on the banks of the Vinkus River, a stand of young deciduous trees grew fairly close together. A forest fire some eight or ten years earlier had leveled the foliage, so what had sprung up in the ashes was of first growth, and all roughly the same height. Had Brrr possessed a spyglass, and had he thought to train his eyes in that direction, he might have caught a glimpse of a strange and troubled head swimming above the tips of the adolescent trees. It had ears like a dragon, and eyes like a dragon, but its tread was continuous, more like a serpent dragging its huge tail than like a quadruped galumphing along. But Brrr had no such spyglass.
• 6 •
T HE CLOCK was moving rather slowly; the lads who pushed and pulled it were struggling across the terrain. It felt as if they were hauling the wagon over a series of railway ties without the benefit of steel runner rails, since the ground was fretted with half-submerged roots of oakhair trees.
The dwarf and his new recruit walked ahead, picking out the best route. They would need to stop before long, as the sky was paling.
“We shall want to take special care, Lady Lucky,” said Mr. Boss. “Usually we like to sidestep troublesome neighborhoods, but our advice this time is to thread our way among contentious populations of nasty, armed men. Reach a safe haven just between them—a tall stone house where custom requires we be granted sanctuary.”
“Sanctuary comes at a cost, however hidden,” she replied.
“Oh, our private Missy Prissy condescends to comment!” The dwarf skipped in place. His mockery was affectionate, but it knew no restraints. “Do tell, darling.”
“I mean nothing by it. Just—just that no rescue comes free.”
“You’re sulky, you’re surly, because we impressed you into service after we saved you from that dolorous tower. That’s the thanks we get. My feelings are hurt.”
She shrugged. Perhaps she did mean that. Some weeks ago, in her life before now, her aging employer had locked her in the top floor of a stone turret. She’d been retained as a nurse, but he wanted more than medical care, and she had refused to yield to his advances. (Well, she couldn’t even if she’d wanted.)
He had gloated at her from below, by turns cajoling and threatening, until one morning, when a grape had become lodged in his windpipe. She couldn’t throw herself out the high window to revive him; the drop was too steep. She couldn’t beat the door down (she had tried that). She watched him stagger to his knees and clutch his throat, and look up at her. He couldn’t speak. She had all she could do not to sing down to him, “Did you take your tablets before your meal?” When he fell, his body made a shadow and then a stain on the terrace.
She feared starvation, but scarcely a day later the dwarf and his crew came along with their awesome Clock. The Dragon had stretched its armored swanlike neck nearly as high as her windowsill, and she had been able to escape, exchanging one affectionate fiend for another. But at least the dwarf and his toothsome boys had sworn against sex with a woman, so they were a better company to keep for the time being.
Mr. Boss deduced that his reticent recruit was in a perplexed mood. He asked, “What were you doing in the service of that Grandpa Ogre, anyway?”
She looked hither and yon. Though the boys were far enough ahead not to hear, she didn’t want to talk about most of it. She said, “My invalid master professed that in exchange for chores I could perform, I could barter for my freedom. I had three years to go when he became cross with me and locked me in that tower. It was too high to escape from, unless one wanted to jump to one’s death. Once in my childhood I had thought I could fly—but I had no wings of my own. It took your dragon with its own wings to reach its neck up so I could crawl on top of it, and scramble to safety. Did the dragon tell you I would be there, or was it just my luck?”
“Please! I don’t dabble in contingency theory. Too rich for my numbish skull.”
