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“The Munchkinlanders were unnecessarily cruel,” said Sister Doctor. “With their penchant for thoroughness, they did in an entire regiment that might have surrendered.”
“You take a lofty point of view.” Sister Apothecaire, being a Munchkinlander herself, was denied loftiness of any sort. “The Emerald City forces have invaded Munchkinland to annex the other lake—the big lake, the good lake. An illegitimate exercise from every angle. Why shouldn’t the Munchkinlanders defend their territory any way they see fit?”
“Good water and bad,” said the Lion, wanting to avoid taking sides here. “One lake is dead—a depthless basin of venom as far as anyone knows—and the other lake, only miles away, is the fount of life for the greatest green basket of arable land that Oz has. How can water display such variety in character?”
“You can be of help, Sir Brrr,” said Sister Apothecaire. “If you will. The dwarf tells us that the Munchkinlanders suffered heavy casualties on the ground before they conceived of this maneuver. We have had all our cart horses and donkeys requisitioned by one militia or another over the past several weeks. We have no way of pulling a cart for the collection of suffering bodies. Would you oblige us?”
He looked at Sister Doctor, imagining she would disapprove of offering succor to wounded Munchkinlanders, since she disapproved of their tactics. But she disappointed him; her cold dispersal of mercy, such a mercy as it was, was unequivocal.
“I think we have a cart in whose harness you would fit,” she said. “An embarrassment, I know—an indignity—but this is war, Sir Brrr.”
“I couldn’t possibly,” he said. “For one thing, there is the matter of an old injury to my spine. I try not to complain of it, but it makes some sorts of labor quite out of the question.”
“I have many
liniments useful at reviving sore muscles,” said Sister Apothecaire. “I keep a full stock of balms and lotions.”
“Then there is the deeper matter of my obligation to the Crown,” continued Brrr over her remarks. “I need to finish up my enquiries and be on my way to file my report.”
“You will be lucky to get out,” said Sister Doctor. “If what the dwarf tells us is true, then the Emerald City Messiars will launch an even more virulent campaign against the Munchkinlanders, and this quiet hermitage sits right in the path from one camp to another.”
“I will do what I must,” said the Lion.
“I will pray for the souls of my countrymen,” said Sister Apothecaire.
“I will hold grudges,” said Sister Doctor to them both, and she swept down the stairs. The glass cat, which had been silent throughout, hissed.
• 2 •
B RRR RETURNED to the interrogation parlor, but Yackle wasn’t there. She was in chapel, listening to liturgical music about flights of angels escorting the lucky dead to their rewards, a good rest among them.
The well of dark in which Yackle lived was something unlike what her companions assumed. Her blindness sometimes seemed to have little to do with vision. It seemed instead a kind of lack of desire, or of the desire that she imagined others felt. She experienced anticipation without the expectation of release—rather like what she assumed the libido of a eunuch might feel like. Or the spiritual ambitions of, say, a bedbug.
So in the chapel, as the maunts prayed for the drowned EC Messiars, Yackle didn’t listen to the devotional longing of the spinsters around her. She who didn’t seem able to die believed in death, as an article of faith—the only article of faith, and out of her reach!—though the notion of an Afterlife filled her with revulsion. Imagine the boredom of an Afterlife! All that undifferentiated yowling of praise. Yet the maunts, who had feared rape and murder or at any rate inconvenience by an occupying army, seemed ready to warble their hopes that forgiveness and everlastingness be granted to their predators. They were good women. They were nuts.
Rather than pray, Yackle trained her memory to recall the faded frescoes of angels that had adorned the higher reaches of the chapel walls and the vaulted ceiling. For all she knew, the images had been whitewashed over by now, angels having gone out of fashion somewhat—but beyond the hedge of her blindness Yackle could picture the paintings well. Gamine female angels in trailing robes, arching their ankles and pouting their mouths as if in perpetual erotic bliss. Wings like mattresses—imagine being an angel prettily taken against the soft resistance of her own feathery appendages. The male angels hardly less vulnerable.
How tedious to be an angel: So much holy vigor, and all directed to the Unnamed God who, without form or name or provable substance, could hardly be expected to enjoy the attentions that angels seemed eager to supply.
Probably those images had been whitewashed over. While the mission settlement of this outpost was conveniently distant from the spiritual governance of the EC, the self-appointed Holy Emperor of Oz had wielded his influence upon the varied religious and agnostic traditions of the nation. Probably the bosomy nymphs and rosy-bottomed angel boys above had been banished beyond the cloud of unknowing, a lime wash swirled with a brush. Oh, the happy memories that the soft-bristled brush must cherish!
She was working herself into a state of agitation.
She tried to concentrate for a moment on the music.
But sacred music—another anomaly. If in the Afterlife every good thing coexists eternally, then music cannot exist. Music is the stuttering of adjacent noises in sequence—stress, discord, complaint, resolve: then release—and sequence means timing. If the sound of music is simultaneous, all notes sounding at once, forever, then it is just sound. A mothy blur of noise. A sea of aural fuzz.
“Yield up, yield up,” sang the maunts, in a dirge written, surprisingly, in waltz time. Yackle remembered it and tapped her toes.
“Yield up your souls
To singe the air.
Yield up, and mount the heavenly stair.
Yield up, yield up,
You’re almost there.
