A Lion Among Men (27 page)

And Yackle had taken years to pick up the trail again. Elphaba had gone underground, a kind of freedom fighter with questionable ethics. She had been damned slippery-who would have thought a green-skinned girl could make herself so invisible? It had taken the best of Yackle’s talents to track her down again. But find her she did, after several years, and this time her reading had been more accurate. She could see that Elphaba would turn to the mauntery (though not why, not that she would arrive with the blood of Fiyero on her wrists); and Yackle had presented herself at the door of the establishment earlier, to be there, to be ready when Elphaba arrived: and so she had been.

Yackle had kept her own counsel, nodding in her blankets like a gaga grandmother, but she’d watched. She’d slipped a hand to Elphaba, a set of gnarled fingers in the green palm, as if she were looking for help up some stairs: She had tried to squeeze strength and courage through that wordless communiqué. Who is to say it didn’t help somewhat?

Had Yackle known what she was doing when she gave Elphaba the broom?

She could no longer remember.

Then, when the time was right, Sister Elphie had left for the West, to the mountaintop seat of the Tigelaars, the ruling Arjiki family. For all her life an upstart, the grit in the eye that makes it water, Elphaba had hoped to become a hermit. Hoped for forgiveness from Fiyero’s widow, hoped for solace from the mountain loneliness.

But the dwarf had come back into the picture, and had delivered to Elphaba an old looking glass she had had in childhood. Elphaba had reheated the glass and modeled it into a globe-turning a mirror into an eye-and who knows what she had been able to see in its depths. The girl was talented.

Talented enough to sidestep everything except, in the end, her own death.

Though perhaps, like Yackle, death was what she had wanted the most.

Yackle groaned. The notion of being Aunt Sophelia, loopy Aunt Sophelia: curse that the idea had roosted in her! Now she’d have to disprove it to her own satisfaction. Still, it made some mad kind of sense: Why else had she spent these weird extended decades of old age stepping around the skirts of someone else’s life? She had never known where the compulsion had come from. Perhaps something as simple as blood.

The house ticked, neither in sympathy nor in accusation.

When you can’t die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.

Yackle couldn’t see the dawn, but she could hear in the brush of movement, the wind against roofing tiles, and in the swell of birdsong that light was rising. She was tired without exhaustion, or exhausted without weariness-it was hard to put into words.

Still, she asked herself: If I am not mad Aunt Sophelia Thropp, and never was, then who put me here? Who had enough influence to knock me into a somewhat human figure in a world of more fully human creatures as well as Animal figures-and bystanding dwarves? And prophetic clocks?

If I were appointed to generate change in Elphaba’s life, who had generated the change in mine? The legendary source of evil amongst us, that old she-demon, the Kumbric Witch? Or the grand, dim, fusty, decayed deity, goddess of creation, Lurlina Herself? Or the Unnamed God, more sober because more secretive? (And did unnamed mean un-nameable or “once named but name revoked”? All these years among unionist maunts and she had never asked a single theological question. What was that proof of, besides obduracy?)

Who gave Lurlina or any other deity her power?

The very children, maybe, who were now hearing the story of Elphaba only as the cautionary fable of the Wicked Witch of the West-her rise and fall-and believing it? Cutting their schoolyard morals to conform to the cheap lessons of a propagandized biography?

She couldn’t know. Her head hurt to try to imagine. The closest she came to sleep these days was a kind of slipping sideways into a vision, and this is what she saw: The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again.

Everything was not merely relative, it was-how to put it?-relevant. Representational. Revealing. Referential and reverential both.

No, she wasn’t losing language. She was choking on it.

A
MILE
OR two on, no more than that, and the underbrush was pestered with the movement of small creatures. The company could read the escape routes of the beasts of the forest floor. “The EC division that was approaching from the north beach of Kellswater is headed this way,” decided the sergeant-at-hand. “Lads, look sharp; they’ve stolen a march on us. We want to cross their path before they get here to cross ours. If we’re not careful we’ll rub noses with them.”

“We’ll blow them to kingdom come!” cried one of the boys, excitable but dull. His pals didn’t bother to remind him they traveled without firearms. Their only defense was the dread that the oracle could inspire in the gullible. Though they had no idea how gullible the soldiers of an invading battalion could be, or if they would stop long enough to discover gullibility in themselves.

“Heave now, heave,” called the dwarf, but even he tried to keep his voice down.

The birds of the oakhair forest, who had settled for the night, revived their twitter. Ilianora thought again of the birds in the hall, on the night she had first scribbled a fanciful tale as a stay against discovery. Sing your hearts out, she thought: Let us know from which direction the danger is strongest.

But alone of the company, she walked without much fear. She cared for her companions, in a modest way, and hoped they would survive. Certainly she didn’t want them to suffer. But she had a prerogative of calm, in that she alone had no obligation to the oracle or to the future they all muscled in favor of or against. Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

They couldn’t continue without light now; the night had truly arrived. The dwarf lit torches and gave her one to carry. “Go front, if you’ve the heart for it,” he mumbled to her. She knew the lads would be emboldened by her prominence, and that they couldn’t risk affixing lanterns to the cart lest a stray bullet smash a glass chimney and the whole kindle box explode in flames.

Though what a sight that would be! Another kind of release, she supposed.

She did as she was bidden. She had a decent instinct for finding a way. The floor of the forest was fairly level, here between the lakes, and for that they all were grateful-though who could know for sure they weren’t driving themselves directly into the line of fire of the Munchkinland resistance coming from the east?

Riding up top, the sergeant-at-hand had no need of a whip. Four of his beauty boys, as he called them, in a kind of jerry-rigged harness, dragged the clockwork oracle along. The other three put their shoulders to the back of it, helping it through ruts and over the roots of oakhair trees. The wind had died down, which was unfortunate: As the company made its way through the strung verticals of the oakhair nuts, they set weird shimmering chords to vibrate around them. It sounded like piano strings long out of tune being scampered upon by mice.

Surely if the EC forces were to come upon their left flank, the soldiers would be playing their own entrance theme?

If the acolytes of the Clock stopped, and let all the oakhair strands fall silent, they might hear where else in the forest a cacophony was being struck. But the boys were now zealous and slightly mad with fear, and wouldn’t respond to the sergeant-at-hand’s proposal that they pause for a moment to listen.

The wagon met a gentle but longer slope than usual, and the boys grunted at their work. Though he weighed little, the sergeant-at-hand leaped from his perch to lighten the load. He came forward to walk beside Ilianora. He stood only half as tall as she did, when he was standing upright. She thought, not for the first time, This little man, these seven boys: It sounds like a story I might have made up, back when I was writing down such fancies.

“I’ve been through this way before,” he said. “We’ll level off for a bit, and unless the undergrowth is fuller than usual, we ought to be able to see Kellswater down to our left.”

“You’ve been everywhere in Oz,” she replied.

“Sure seems like it, after all this time.” He knew enough not to ask her about her own travels. She wouldn’t answer. Waste of breath.

“How far to the northeast was the Munchkinlander encampme-”

“Shhh-”

They were reaching the flattening crest of the long slope, and the first missile flew by-not a rifle shot, as they’d expected, but an arrow. It buried its head in a tree trunk, and a second followed, and a third.

“We’re in it,” he hissed. “Boys, drop!” Ilianora clamped the cap on the lamp to extinguish it, to buy them a minute or two. But four more arrows, and the shouts of a force thrashing up the left flank of the rise: It would be only a moment before they were captured.

The moon cruelly opened her eye from behind the mounded cutouts of cloud, and they could see the silhouettes of soldiers against the steel-white water of the lake below.

“We’ll plead neutrality, see where it gets us,” said the dwarf, dragging at Ilianora’s hand to pull her to her knees. “Boys, you imbeciles, get down!”

Being lower down, the soldiers were at a disadvantage, but they were trained. Ilianora could see the crossbow aiming, could see the glint of bayonet. They swarmed-thirty, forty, fifty-a half mile out. The sound of crushing underbrush, the strum of advancing men. “Hie, on the narrow,” cried one; the voice was businesslike as it carried, like a professional herder of cattle. “Hist, second volley,” called another. “Grade and scale,” said someone nearish; “Bloody unlikely,” came the reply. A shot rang out.

“We fly no emblem!” cried the sergeant-at-hand, but another shot muddied the sound of his words. “Fucking hell, we offer no resistance!” he yelled, irritated enough that his voice rattled into a falsetto shriek.

The Clock had other ideas about this. The great dragon head lifted from its mechanical sleep and rotated like a swan, and eyes with a dull carmine spark shifted in the dark. The leather nostrils dilated and the tin scales scraped upon one another as the armature of the wings stretched like two sails in the woods. It was, perhaps, just enough to cause the closest EC Messiars to halt, as they tried to work out what huge creature waited, glowering and creaking in the dark. The light shifted.

“Keep going!” cried the sergeant-at-hand to his pony-boys. “Mischief is having her own say!”

The nostrils flared. Coils of steam-grey smoke fell out in slow hanks, unrolling as they dropped, thickening like gelatin beads in water. Within a moment, the Clock was shrouded in a fog that smelled of yeast and mud.

“Grade and lower!” cried a commander. “Pox on my eyes,” cried an advance scout, quite close; they could hear him breathing and swearing, and he fell to the ground.

“I mean to keep on,” said the sergeant-at-hand. “Walk the way forward, Miss Trip-Through-the-Trees, and pluck our way out of here, strand by strand if you must.”

The hilltop was smeared with fog, no less troublesome to Ilianora than to the Emerald City division, but she’d had the advantage of reaching the summit before their attackers, and she had seen a bit of how the land went. Along a ridge, and then down a scalloped recess; she could get them that far. She reached out and plucked a wry song out of the struts of the forest. A pizzicato progress. The company kept close behind her, and the dragon trawled a breathy cloak that did not quickly thin.

They were well away, perhaps as much as a mile, before the oakhair trees gave out, and a grove of taller stag-head oaks crowned the next gentle hump. There the company paused to rest and judge by the moon whether they had strayed too far east. The dwarf’s destination was due north. Clearest route out of the danger was due north. The dragon’s eyes had gone dim and the bellows of its nostrils now trailed only faint, acrid wisps. Its wings settled back in their customary place, folded across their mount with reticulated wrist-claws pointing straight up like spear heads.

“It’s a bad night to be wandering in the woods,” said the sergeant-at-hand. “Unlucky for some, though not for us. Hide your eyes lest the glint give us away.”

The company froze, looking through fingers where he pointed. Eighty feet to the northeast, a group of Munchkinlanders in tabards and boots were preparing some sort of a catapult. They were whispering-they must have heard something of the commotion downslope. But they seemed oblivious of the company of the Clock hunched on its separate hilltop. They were too involved in their own efforts at stirring something in a large spherical iron pot at least as tall as they were.

It was nothing short of a miracle that their attention was so riveted by their preparations. Yet through the dragon’s breath, which continued to lay close to the ground, the muffled complaints of the EC men clearly identified their location: a mile or so along the ridge and below it, to the west. The twang of snapped oakhair strands; the cursing of the soldiers and the hollering insults of their officers.

The smoke didn’t clear for another quarter hour, by which time the Munchkinlander guerrillas had slid their heavy artillery overland on something like a forest sledge, sleek birch runners that used the slick of pine needles to advantage. When the smoke thinned enough that the moonlight again struck the surface of Kellswater, the company of the Clock could see well enough. Not the attack of the Munchkinlanders, not the lobbing of the fiery pitch they’d prepared in their dreadful cup. Not the EC soldiers cowering or falling back-all that remained concealed by the great dark and undifferentiated folds of the hills, the screen of oakhair limbs. What the company could see was the metallic rings of bright moonlit water that grew out from the shore, circles interrupting slow circles, chevrons divided into shards, as one after another the EC Messiars were driven backward into the lake.