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“I’m coming,” she announced, for it was her history to do so, and she could no more avoid her future than she could escape her past. However often she sat quietly apart, fretting over it. “I’m coming,” she called louder, so they could hear her over the sound of cannon.
A Question of Influence
• 1 •
T HE GLASS cat made a sound of complaint; Brrr returned to the present.
“Oooh, Shadowpuppet, supper will be coming soon. These poor servants of the Unnamed God won’t let you go hungry. Their brief doesn’t allow it.”
The cat came to his lap and licked at some old crumbs caught in the pilling of Brrr’s weskit. Brrr petted it, trying to provoke a purr. This was the only warmth Shadowpuppet could show, a tonal warmth: Its body was immune to changes of heat and cold, so far as Brrr could tell.
What an advantage. Maybe it came from old age. Something to anticipate, a reprieve.
Even ancient Yackle seemed somewhat inert, emotionally: She was enduring her apparent immortality with stoicism. He’d be driven mad if he thought the blandishments of death were to be denied him forever.
He tried to escape those memories that had crowded upon him this past hour: his disastrous incompatibility with clans either Animal or human, like the Ghullim, like the Shiz banking circle; his mistakes with rogues like Dorothy or Elphaba. His humiliation at the bar of Miss Eldersdotter.
Collaborator. But to collaborate implied a betrayal of one’s natural tribe, and if one didn’t have a natural tribe…
Perhaps Yackle possessed a shred of mercy; perhaps she had taken herself away not to pray, but to get out of the room while the more heinous memories surged upon him. Perhaps she’d been able to guess that, between Traum and this off-center cloister, he had endured a lifetime of collapsing hopes and misadventures.
If so—if he could credit the old bitch with that much feeling—he had a little to thank her for. Though given his record, he was probably wrong. He was another pawn in another campaign, and hadn’t sussed out yet what her angle was.
In any case, Yackle would be coming back from chapel soon, unless she’d died a death holier than the life she’d led. Meanwhile, the small stars showed up one by one, picking their way slowly, reluctantly, through the gloaming. (He’d preferred overcast nights ever since the creepy atmospherics of the Cloud Swamp.) The stars made a rash in a sky that glowed the color of those mythical seas painted by Dobbius and his followers. A serpent green wash overlaid with a smudge of blue-coal Conté crayon applied with forefinger. In another ten minutes the green of the heavens would drown under the black, and night would be fully and legally arrived. For now, the day played its last hand, the sky reveling in its fullest dimensionality, flaring up into all directions: height, breadth, depth, lastingness.
The noise of cannon, distant but not comfortably distant enough, corresponded with the sound of Yackle approaching down the hall, a sloughing and sighing presence.
She came into the room, hitting backward at the helpful hand of the novice who had been guiding her. “Enough, you crow; go pester some other poor wren. I’ll break my hip if I’ve a mind to, and nothing you can do about it.”
“Begging pardon, Mother Yackle, but Sister Doctor asks me to show the Lion to his evening chamber, and you to yours. I bring you here just to say your good evenings, and then I’ll bring you on.”
“I’ll sit here in the dark. I don’t need a bed.”
“I’m not wasting time at sleep,” said Brrr. “Can’t you hear that gunfire? Whatever is happening is coming closer. Let’s finish up here and I’ll be on my way under cover of darkness, the way I came. I have no intention of spending a night here.”
“I’ll wait outside,” said the novice. “I’ll give you ten minutes. I am not at liberty to countermand Sister Doctor’s orders.”
The young woman retreated, and the door closed. Yackle bumped her way to her chair; Brrr didn’t offer to help her. She seemed more tired, though hardly an ounce more dead than before.
“Restored, I trust?” said Brrr bitterly.
“They haven’t changed, those women,” said Yackle. “For what seems like decades I sat among them, wondering how they did it, all that continence of emotion, all that rigor and fervor. I still wonder. I wasn’t really made for this world.” By her tone he knew she meant the world at large, not just the mauntery.
“Sentimental religiosity?” he asked. “It claws at one, doesn’t it.”
“I haven’t the goods to define it. Not to defend it nor belittle it. It just gets the better of me, that’s all. How can they sing those hymns to an Unnamed God? What is the point?”
Not for him to answer, not that one. “Why are you so sour? You are a maunt, after all. Or masqueraded as one all these years.”
“I make as few claims for my spirituality as you make for your courage,” she snapped. “The truth is, I wish I were deaf as well as blind. Relieved from listening to the biddies going at one another. Sister Doctor is in charge, more or less, but her aide-in-the-surgery, Sister Apothecaire, has never forgotten that Sister Doctor was elevated while she was passed over. The rub of it hasn’t mattered much for years, I imagine, but with an invasion of Munchkinland by the Emper
or’s forces about to happen, well, that stout little Munchkinlander Sister Bulldog-Apothecaire thinks Sister Doctor is proving too neutral a leader.”
“Very psychologic of you.”
“Don’t mock me. The scorn on both sides is deafening. Toadying appeaser, thinks Sister Apothecaire of Sister Doctor. Bloody hotblooded peasant, thinks Sister Doctor of Sister Apothecaire. You suppose I can’t hear all this in how they intone their prayers?”
“You do have good ears,” said Brrr. “Quite a liability to your peace of mind, I can see that.”
