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We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt. We know, we know: the price of living is corruption. There isn’t as much light as there once was. In the grave we lapse back into undifferentiated sameness.
Sister Hospitality paused in her reveries, not knowing if she was thinking her own thoughts or imagining some unknown crone’s. She slammed shut the small panel and returned to her chores.
In the garden, no one approached with a rake to pull away last year’s matted leaves. The tulips came up crippled. The bas-relief pagan goddess, sculpted into the western wall before unionism had commandeered this ancient temple site for a cloister, had grown a beard of winter moss: no one pulled it away. A useful disguise in time of war, maybe. Who could fuss over that?
Maybe the Unnamed God would grace them yet. Maybe the coming war would prove to be rumor, fear, nothing more.
The apple blossoms trembled and fell. No one gathered them.
The cats lost their chance to practice hunting, as even the mice had fled.
In the herb garden, a spiderweb grew on the sundial. No one swept it away. On bright days, laddered shadows crept across the oxidizing numerals, giving the numbered hours new accents, one by one, until the sun went down or the clouds came in. Any variety of darkness can silence a sundial.
Maybe there would be no armed conflict, the maunts commented encouragingly. But each maunt in her own way felt the curse of war’s inevitability.
Sister Laundry would no longer dry the sheets in the sun, for they looked like white flags of surrender and no one wanted soldiers garrisoned in the mauntery. Sister Hospitality began refusing shelter to wanderers through these isolated reaches, lest they turn out to be secret agents. Behind closed doors, Sister Apothecaire availed herself of a calming beverage usually reserved for those in medical distress. Sister Petty Cash had bad dreams. “The cost of war,” she murmured, her voice trailing off.
“We’ve no reason to fear either army,” insisted Sister Doctor, when the subject came due for an update at Council. “Three weeks ago, when the Munchkinland marauders swept by, making their inept preemptive strike into Loyal Oz, they didn’t stop to rape and plunder us as they passed. They hoped to wreak havoc on the Emperor’s forces massing to the west, but it appears the upstarts have managed only to wreak a spot of bother. Sisters, be sensible. Now the Munchkinlanders are in—what’s it called?—hot retreat. Fleeing for their lives. They’ll be too distracted to drop in for a refreshment while they’re being pushed back to their own borders. Lighten up.”
The maunts, pledged to obedience, tried to lighten up, though Sister Doctor’s customary brusqueness of diagnosis seemed, perhaps, inadequate to riddles of military strategy.
Still, the House of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows, meant to be remote from worldly concerns, stood this month like a Gillikinese sycamore trying to camouflage itself in a Quadling rice paddy. An exceedingly prominent target. There was no other establishment in the district so capacious, so securable, so fitted with supplies. Most of the maunts felt it was only a matter of time. And when the time came, which army would knock at the doors? The home team or the rebel rabble? The well-trained Emerald City army forces or the Munchkinlander militia, that ad hoc volunteer swarm? Though the mauntery stood in Loyal Oz, the maunts, by dint of their spiritual allegiances, considered displays of patriotism inappropriate, if not gauche. Though they did wonder: Would either adversary show mercy to the self-quarantined isolates of a religious order?
“Of course they will,” argued Sister Doctor from the lectern. “We are the exemplars of mercy. We set the standard, and an army has no choice but to respect our standards.”
The maunts nodded, respectful but unconvinced. Men were beasts. Everyone knew that. It’s why most of the women had entered the mauntery in the first place.
Dinner conversation revolved around nothing but military operations. These days the women had to raise their voices to be heard above the sound of military skirmishes. Practice charges, they hoped. Trees were being felled for the construction of catapults: Who could think properly with all that racket? Who could pray—or, put another way, who could stop praying?
To add injury to insult, a projectile of flaming pitch and straw went astray and landed on the leads of the chapel, so the Council was burdened with the added annoyance of home repair. It was impossible to persuade skilled trade to venture behind the battle lines. Sister Hammer did what she could, but even so.
Nightly, from the bluestone bartizans, Sister Doctor reviewed the campfires of opposing forces as they shifted back and forth, west and east. A sally, a retreat: one could read the campaign from this height. Mutton for supper; one could smell the menu.
Blinking with encouragement, she reported that the Emerald City brigades looked set to push the Munchkinlander upstarts back to their borders and perhaps beyond, farther east, right into Munchkinland proper. Sister Apothecaire, a displaced Munchkin of the shorter sort, wasn’t able to suppress a bark of affront at this naked sympathy for the Throne. So Sister Doctor shut up about the rumor that the Emperor was going to use the Munchkinlanders’ misadventure as an excuse to invade and to capture the lake of Restwater, finally to sever dissident Munchkinland, the breadbasket of Oz, from its own water supply. Political pundits had long predicted this action: The Munchkinlander militias had cooked their own goose, but good. Done Loyal Oz a great service, they had, by ceding the moral high ground, handing their enemy a legitimate reason to retaliate. Very smart of them. The little morons.
“Remember to breathe,” advised Sister Doctor to her companions. “It is, after all, the secret of life.”
Obediently, the maunts breathed, if not much easier, and they sang songs of gratitude for having been spared—for those who had been spared, they took pains to remember.
They paid for their neutrality in baskets of apples, in buckets of water pulled from their well. They fed the professional Emerald City Messiars as fully as, three weeks earlier, they had fed the stumpy little Munchkinlander farmer-soldiers. They never stinted at feeding the hungry, as long as the portions could be lowered over the wall in a basket, as long as the hungry didn’t need spoon-feeding. There was a limit to everything: eggs, bandages, breath, even mercy. If the maunts beggared themselves, who would be left to offer even half a mercy?
When Sister Doctor and her lowly and disgruntled colleague, Sister Apothecaire, went forth to tend to the wounded, they left by a back door, and under cover of darkness.
• 3 •
S OME MILES south—away from the nickering of cavalry horses, the cloudy antiphons of the maunts—the nighttime sounds of Oz took on a more arbitrary rhythm. A breeze in the higher branches of trees. The percussive thunk of a frog objecting to his neighbors. Silky passage of water snake, chirr of midnight mosquito. Woodland Oz going about its nocturnal business. Adequate peace.
Safely buried in deep forest, the infallible Clock counted out the seconds of its life in waltzing ticks like hazelnuts dropping into a wooden bucket. Tik tik tok, tik tik tok.
The dwarf and his company of superstitious boys snored on. The Clock’s only female attendant, a woman of uncertain age, kept the night watch against reconnaissance scouts or beasts or light-fingered mendicants. She was still new to this troupe—and she owed them her life—so she did what she was told, picking up what information she could as it fell her way.
She’d learned that now and then, sometimes for years at a stretch, the Clock of the Time Dragon dropped out of sight. The acolytes of the Clock would shutter up the preposterous thing. They trusted in its own infernal charms to protect it. And maybe the boys were sensible enough to do so. Whenever the sergeant-at-hand called back the company—a few starry-eyed converts compensating for any no-shows—they apparently always found their treasure in working trim. Sometimes it would be overgrown with forest ivy or moss. Dead leaves, tendrils of cobweb. Perhaps a kind of natural camouflage the Clock called to itself. It didn’t matter. The handmade masterpiece snapped right back to business. The play of its gears remained deft, the tension in its belts and chains keen. Its mechanical advantage was said to have been augmented by a stubbornly adhesive magic.
The night watchwoman, a novice in service of the Clock, had asked the sergeant-at-hand their destination.
“We meander as whimsy dictates unless the Clock gives explicit advice,” he’d answered. “Whimsy is fate, too: just less knowable.”
“Did whimsy bring you to rescue me, Mr. Boss,” she asked, “or were you bound by advice?”
