AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The dwarf shrugged. “I have a job and I do it: I protect the book. The Clock of the Time Dragon was magicked up as a kind of reliquary for the Grimmerie when it’s needed. I don’t ask questions. Elphaba seemed to be the one most capable of reading it correctly. Given her bloodlines, maybe, her natural talents. And she found the book where the magician left it, and used it, and showed the Wizard of Oz a page of it. He hunted for it ever after, but when Elphaba disappeared and the Wizard abdicated, the book ended up with her erstwhile friend Galinda. Sorry: Glinda, onetime Throne Minister of Oz. Our Miss Glinda returned the Grimmerie to me when I was passing by her country estate, Mockbeggar Hall, some years ago. It’s been safe here ever since, until today, when the Clock determined it was time to reveal its treasure to you bozos.”
“Yackle,” said Ilianora. “Yackle, what are you doing?” and Brrr realized he had been watching the dwarf, and clutching the Cat, keeping the troublesome elements under control, his back turned from Yackle and the Grimmerie.
She had slipped her winding robe off her shoulders like a shawl.
While she had been speaking, the watermark had returned to fill both pages of the open volume, and the page had gone from ivory to pale spring green. It looked more like Elphaba than ever, with her sharp nose and slightly crooked hat, and her zigzaggy bony form at the ready for flight, for battle against some treachery they couldn’t see just off the margins of the page.
The lines of the watermark glowed a yellower, fiery green, and the shape of the Witch contorted, as if working out a kink in her lower back.
Then the watermark rose off the page. It did not flesh out, like a suddenly luminous puppet or like a radioactive green parrot, but retained its drawn outline, its crude symbolic origin. It reared, it rose in a sweep of cape, it lifted like a green flower from a bed of words and red roses on a black fringed background. It was not Elphaba; she was not here; her time was over and done. It was the mark of Elphaba, though, vivid as ever. Their eyes stung, to see her again, or for the first time.
“Of course,” said Yackle, turning for a moment and glowing at Ilianora. “You have a brother. Of course you must go on! Because history can’t be vexed by small players; don’t you know?” She looked at Ilianora, at the dwarf, at Brrr, with an expression too complex, too pungent to understand. “Don’t you understand? She’s coming back—”
Brrr thought, for an instant—but what does she mean? In her weird seeingness, can Yackle picture Muhlama H’aekeem? Or does she mean the lost Ozma, or Elphaba, who melted away, or the fairy goddess Lurline, or the Kumbric Witch, or even Dorothy the interloper?
In any case, Yackle let her shroud slip to the floor, and from her naked, poxy back unfurled two capacious sails of feather and strut and papery light. Unused these dozens of years, they had lost none of their power to elevate. Yackle rose in the air in the courtyard of the House of Saint Glinda, her calloused heels showing the dirt and detritus of the cobbles, the skin around her shanks and buttocks sagging, bruised, vivid with ancient life. She said nothing more, but as the watermark of Elphaba began to sink back again to flatness on its page, Yackle followed it. She disappeared into the Grimmerie like a diver entering the deepest parts of a magic pool: slow-motion, full of grace, the toes in the gleam; casting off wretchedness, casting off the shroud. She folded magically into the Grimmerie, her third and fourth dimensions laddering accordion-like into the secret unnamed dimensions of a page. They all leaned over the great book to watch.
But she wasn’t fully done. Just before her arms and wing tips and head lost their material shapeliness, her hands twisted in the air. Brrr, who had met Yackle only twenty-four hours earlier, knew her well enough to guess what she intended. He reached over the book as one will lean over a precipice. Shadowpuppet-Malky began to squirm and yowl, but Ilianora grabbed its rear paws. Together she and Brrr delivered the glass Cat to Yackle’s hands. Only a vowel-less snarl was left behind as Yackle’s wing tips and wrists and tendrils of hair and the glimmer of hostage Cat disappeared into the pages of the Grimmerie.
“I’ve sworn off taking sides,” said Ilianora fiercely, “but good riddance to bad rubbish. I hope it finds itself in some sort of a pit of hounds in there.”
“That hissy little piece of work won’t do any more damage while penned in that book,” said Brrr. “Just hope it doesn’t try to claw its way out from the inside.”
They peered to see if Shadowpuppet was pictured on the page, or even if Yackle was, but the letters had come crowding back. They’d enlarged, and begun to superimpose themselves yeastily, one upon the other, so that only the spaces between the loops of printed letters showed like dwindling dots of light. Then the words darkened entirely and screened the paper with darkness. In the sea of black remained the watermark, faintly, vernally. No other image, no Yackle, no Shadowpuppet. No prophecies about Liir and Candle and their daughter.
The Grimmerie shut itself; the Clock withdrew the book into a hidden chamber, the
dragon up top sighed and clanked rather noisily to a finish—Show’s over, folks—and they were out of the realm of mystery, and back in the realm of war.
• 5 •
T HOUGH THEY all stood for a minute, in between moments, as a light wind pushed into the courtyard, and a smell of smoke and greenery strengthened. It whisked their spirits in silence; they felt upbraided by possibility; they felt taunted by the aesthetic appeal of justice. They felt hungry, and several of them felt horny, and the light flickered as a flock of birds coursed against the sun—too high to be identified, too high to be heard, but not too high to be influential.
• 6 •
W HILE BRRR was halted among this latest grab bag of companions, he was alone in the anointment of a quickly stinging grief. A hollow feeling, before forgetfulness rushed in to blanket and anaesthetise. Yackle had not been his antagonist after all. He’d learned this just well enough to feel the ache of her departure. Even the thorn in the paw makes sense while it stabs, and she was both thorn and balm.
His reverie was broken by the sound of footsteps. The Lion looked up to see Sister Apothecaire stumping along a rampart. She brandished a ring of keys and was blathering nearly incoherently.
“Slow down,” called Brrr. “Take a breath. You’ll pop a button or burst a spleen.”
“They’re advancing, oh sweet Lurline,” said Sister Apothecaire, in her panic reverting to pagan sensibilities, for Lurline had come from history and gone into myth long before faith in the Unnamed God had called maunts to live in community and service. So long ago that no one could ascertain the chronology of it.
“While we were in Council, and we left you locked up—oh—you’re out”—she noticed—“the Munchkinlanders have come up with a startling crew of backup patriots! Lord bless ’em! But they’re converging from the east, and it looks as if a battle will indeed be joined right here, on the very skirts of our precincts. And the good sisters at last have fled, that toady Sister Doctor leading the gallop! I said I would hurry back to release you, once we had remembered about you, and no one protested. Who wants a blot like that in our copybooks? So here I am. Consider yourself released. Shoo.” She waved her hands. “Where’s Mother Yackle?”
“Safe,” said Brrr.
“You’re a brave woman, good Sister,” said Ilianora, starting to help the dwarf strap up doors, slotting the stages like drawers back into the bureau of clockwork.
“Brave or good, coward or bad, I don’t know and I don’t care,” she said. “Get out while you can. I have the keys and there is no governing Council or Superior Maunt to stop me. I’m going to open the doors to the Munchkinlanders and give them a fighting chance. Unless you want to be caught in here with them, take to your heels, at once!”
“Which way should we go?” asked the dwarf. “We have precious cargo.”
Do we? wondered Brrr. He supposed that Mr. Boss was referring to the Clock of the Time Dragon and the Grimmerie. All the rest of them—Ilianora among them, even the dwarf himself—were more or less dispensable.
Sister Apothecaire replied, “I don’t know which army would trouble you least. It’s your choice. Munchkinlanders are sweeping up in a shallow curve from the eastern edges of the oakhair forest. It’s a counterattack in advance of the arrival of the Emperor’s armies. We maunts evacuated to the northwest—deeper into Gillikin, whether I like it or not. The pincers are closing exactly upon this troubled house: It stands precisely where the East and the West will meet and have their bloodshed, and in a matter of quarter hours, not days. I have sung my alarum to you, now fly if you will; be it on your own heads if you won’t. I must be at the ready. I will offer flame and pitch from the ramparts to any EC soldiers, or sanctuary should the Munchkinlanders get here first.”
“You can’t rely on virtue and vice being so evenly distributed,” said Ilianora.
