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“That’s what they all want to know.” The sergeant-at-hand, a dwarf with regrettably sloppy habits of dental hygiene, leered his mustardy smile. “But it’s confidential, my darling, my dimple. Trade secrets indeedy.”
For five weeks the self-appointed acolytes had been pushing and dragging the towering Clock, which was mounted on a wheeled flatbed. They kept away from farmhouses, going overland through pastures and paddocks. If they had to pass through a small village, they waited till midnight.
Th
e equipage rocked and lurched like a small ornate ship on stony seas. Above, the clockwork dragon supervised. How much of Oz those dull eyes had taken in. Oz rehearsing itself, rearranging itself decade after decade. Whimsy and fate, destiny and accident. The fall of the house of Ozma, the dirty years of the Wizard, the rise of impeccable Shell, holy Emperor of Oz. Fortunes, in any case: changeable fortunes converted into the changeless facts of biography by every passing tick of its mechanisms.
After the Clock had rescued her, its sergeant-at-hand had briefed the newest convert. “We pick our way with superior caution,” the dwarf told her. “Everything’s tinder-hot now and ready to conflagrate. We have our task. The Clock tells us so. Quietly, quickly, like mice stealing between the toes of battling manticores and basilisks, we inch forward as we’re told.”
“Imagine what it’s seen since we last brung it along to an audience,” one beardless boy said. “Imagine the stupefied Squirrel or idiot Monkey coming across this in the greenwood! Sitting all ’lone and full of itself, like a pagan temple! Without us to service it, you think our smoky friend here would rouse itself and deliver a pronouncement?”
“For a chattering Monkey? Get real. That ever happen, I’d like to see so! Fun for the Monkey who goes shrieking mad and he drop right out of his tree!”
The dwarf knew, but did not say, that in those quiescent periods in the forsaken outlands, creatures did creep up to sniff, to examine, even to climb over the peculiar heap of marvels. A dense woods is not off-limits to its own residents. And woodland creatures take notice of everything invading their territory, including fate.
Monkeys, venerable and caustic, lost no opportunity to chitter. Parrots, much given to expressing their opinions, gossiped in serrated squawks. Younger, more timid habitants approached in their own time. A garter snake and his sister. A raccoon with a tendency to morbid depression. The odd lion cub among them.
The newest vigil keeper didn’t worry so much about animals. Let them come up and sniff. It was men she avoided as best she could. So she liked this task of midnight watch. In company but still alone. The lads in a loose jumble of limbs, their wizened old sergeant-at-hand shifting in his creaking hammock. She could move around as she liked. It wasn’t that, if awake, this lot would plague her much. They knew better. But she enjoyed the privacy. To the veteran of prison, solitude can offer few unsavory surprises.
She removed her shawl and hung it on a branch, and with steps that whispered in the pine needles, she approached the water. A small cove of Restwater, Oz’s inland sea, made an intimate bathing chamber. Once out of sight of her sleeping companions—out of sight should they awaken, that is—she unfastened the clasps of her tunic and lifted it over her shoulders. Beneath, she wore a binding sheath, which she loosened and began to remove, folding it back upon itself as she exposed her stomach and then her breasts.
She wasn’t thinking of her breasts, still full and high, though the hormone-whipped lads often did. She was thinking of white paper and dark ink, and the difficulty and danger of scoring a page with lines of ink, to make it sing, if it could. If she could make it.
But if it sang, perhaps it would say something other than she intended. Perhaps it couldn’t help but say who she was, where she was, though she kept all things hidden that she could manage.
Books could seem to unleash all the hallelujahs of hell—she had known one that could, in her past; it was a volume of enchantments known as the Grimmerie—but even books that did not detonate into history, as the Grimmerie had, could still whisper their private secrets. And her appetite to write was countermanded by a dread of being read and recognized.
Her breasts, loosened from their cotton corset, itched; they rolled outward, toward her biceps. Absentmindedly she caressed first one and then the other with the back of her hand. Then she untucked the sash that secured her skirts. She hung the skirts on nearby branches, further curtaining herself from mortal eyes, should any be open.
Before she stepped into the still water, she ran the fingers of her right hand along the scar between her legs. This was not for pleasure—there was no pleasure left—but as a test of assurance that the seal had not been broken.
Solitude, continence, silence: custody of her own history; custody of any future that might have descended from her, squawking and looking to suck.
Satisfied. More than satisfied, relieved, she arched a foot to enter the water. But before she did, she saw in the flat green of the pond’s surface a reflection of a moon. At first she thought: Now there’s a surface safer to write upon than paper. The circular page of the moon in the water—words written in water are sure to wash away, and the moon itself no wiser.
Lowering herself to her haunches, preparing to bathe, she realized she was not entirely unobserved. She could see upon the water a curlicued sort of growth like a backward question mark. She knew it for the reflection of the head of the dragon to whose service she and the others were committed.
The dragon’s eye was red, red in the green water. Red, unblinking, unblinkered.
You, you can look all you want, she thought, but even so she slipped into the water hastily.
What words she had thought to write on the face of the moon were washed away from her as she submerged, trying to disturb no one, nothing. Trying not so much as to interrupt a current, even trying not to shatter into soft-edged platelets the green moon in the reflection. Trying to sidestep having any influence at all, now and till the end of her life.
• 4 •
A T DAWN Sister Hospitality was summoned to the back door of the mauntery when the medical team returned, accompanied by a tall, stooped figure.
“We are not housing soldiers,” hissed Sister Hospitality. “You know I made that perfectly clear at Council, Sister Doctor.”
“Whatever this fellow is,” said Sister Doctor, “he is not a soldier.”
The chap was wearing a traveling cloak with a hood finished with bristles of greasy fur—or that is how Sister Hospitality saw it at first. When the visitor dropped the hood, she realized the fringe of fur was an unkempt mane, and the man in need of sanctuary was in fact a Lion.
Sister Hospitality snapped, “Who is this, then? What class and category of aberration? A deserter? A conscientious objector? A visitor from the press?”
“An emissary on a neutral mission,” replied Sister Doctor, removing galoshes caked with gore better left unidentified. “He is taking advantage of the safe passage here allowed by the forward front of the EC Messiars. And we welcome him, Sister Hospitality.” She spat out the name.
The Lion studied the floor as if expecting to be turfed out. An unlit cigar dangled in his mouth, a pad of paper projected from his vest pocket, and a pair of spectacles fitted with green-glass bifocal lenses hung on a chain from his velvet lapel. Sister Hospitality noticed some greying mane hairs stuck to the front of his cloak. His posture…well, it made Sister Hospitality square her own shoulders in a superior way.
