Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02 (20 page)

On his way back to the table he lurched against a soldier, who turned at the thump. Liir recognized him. It was the guy who had told him how to apply to the Home Guard all that time ago—the fellow on the gooseball pitch who’d sheltered with him during a hailstorm. Imagining Liir had approached him intentionally, the soldier said, “Oh, it’s you.”

“Well, it is,” said Liir. “All these years, and never thanked you for the skinny on how to get in.”

“If you’re looking for advice on how to get out, I’m afraid it’s too late now,” said the fellow. He was sleek and rangy both, with hair the color of clarified butter, swept long across the brow and clipped at the nape. Even in this welter and swelter he was wearing officer’s code stripes on the shoulders of his smart civilian tightcoat. A Minor Menacier, by the look of it.

“Liir,” said Liir.

“Some do. They can’t help themselves,” said the petty officer. “
Leer,
” he explained. “How much have you had to drink?”

“Not too much enough of.”

“You ought to sit down. You don’t want to throw up on my threads.”

The Menacier commandeered a small table from a couple of floozies. “Trism,” he said, by way of introduction. “Trism bon Cavalish.”

“Liir.” He never said “Liir Thropp,” though that was his closest approximation to a real name. Formally he’d enrolled as Liir Ko—taking the second part of Kiamo Ko as his surname. Now, though, he didn’t offer even that. The Minor Menacier seemed not to notice, however.

“Do you know where’s we’re going?”

“I’m staying put. But if I knew where you were going and I told you, that’d be treason.” He took a long pull on his beer. “No, I don’t know.”

They studied the crowd in a complacent silence as if they’d been friends for years. Liir didn’t want to ask questions of Trism’s origins, lest Trism ask him the same. So he asked Trism what a Minor Menacier’s duties consisted of. Maybe he’d one day get to be one. Day. A Minor Menacier. Someday. Pluck a duck, the beer was telling.

“Development of Defense,” said Trism. “That I can tell you.”

“Which means what? New sword technique?”

“No, no. I’m in husbandry.”

Liir didn’t know what to say to that; he wasn’t sure what husbandry was.

“Animal husbandry,” Trism explained, though in the noise of the bar, Liir couldn’t tell if he said Animal or animal, the sentient or the nonsentient creature. “Training for military uses,” said Trism at last. “Are you slow, or are you falling in love with me?”

“It’s the beer,” said Jibbidee, swooping down again. “I’m not sure I’d fill him up with any more, begging your pardon, unless you want to husband him home.”

“Sorry; it is the beer,” said Liir, suddenly queasy. “I think I need some air.”

“Can you manage on your own?” By the tone of Trism’s voice he certainly hoped so but courteously he helped Liir up and loaned a strong arm. “Make way, make way; hail hail, the prince of ale,” he cried. Liir felt like that old weevily Scarecrow he’d seen at the Palace. His legs had contradictory intentions.

More or less tumbling out a side door, they were almost plowed into by a carriage careering down the alley from Scrumpet Square. It pulled up to let out more custom. “Whoa, your country needs you, don’t go slipping under the wheels of this fancy rig,” said Trism, hauling Liir back and holding him up.

The door flew open and a man in a fashionable dark brocaded vest jacket descended. “All my small life that stays small and separate comes out now’s time to see me drunkish,” said Liir, “not fair play, that.” The smart figure was Shell.

“Oh ho,” said Shell, in a merry mood. “I knew you’d turn up one day! So, laddio, you’re doing the town? Out soliciting officers, by the look of it? That’s my boy.”

“I’m a Guardsman,” said Liir, straightening up more or less successfully. “Ow.”

“Watch your head. You may need it one day. I wondered where you’d gone! Wicked old Chyde was absolutely flummoxed. He’d no idea what happened to you. Assumed you’d slipped and drowned in one of the canals, but then suicides and other such big shit usually silts up against the grates at one end of the line or the other, and you never did. Somebody said you’d melted, and sifted right through the sieve! Ha! That was a good one.”

“I was looking for Nor,” said Liir, trying to hang on to any small knot of reality he could pinch.

“Sure, and I remember that well. She’d snaked her way out somehow, hadn’t she? And then word of her turned up, now where was it—?”

“I shall leave you to your reunion,” said Trism, starting to detach himself.

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of parting chums,” said Shell. “We’re only young once, lads; make the most of it. And tomorrow you go toodle-oo, I hear. No, I can’t stay and chatter; I’ve work to achieve in the next hour, now that lips are oiled enough to speak what I want to hear. But I’m talking strategy to the armed forces: I’ll save my breath for kissing, or kissing up. Off you go, boys. If you want to borrow my trap and get home in a hurry, just see it’s sent right back. I was young once, I remember. Go ahead.”

“Sir!” snapped Trism. “I am an officer of the Home Guard!”

“And I’m the wicked snitch of the west,” said Shell. “Oh well, I was trying to be useful. Not my strong suit. Driver, an hour, and don’t have too much yourself; I don’t want to end up in hospital. I’m to be back at the Palace by midnight for fun and frolic if I can pay with the coin they require.”

“Nor!” said Liir. Saying the very word, after all this time, had made him come round. “Where is she?”

“Am I your personal secretary? I don’t know. Was it Colwen Grounds in Munchkinland?”

“Couldn’t have been; that’s a hostile state,” intervened Trism, bulking up.

“
You’re
in a hostile state, by the look of it. Don’t sneer at me, Minor Menacier. I get around; that’s my job. But no, it wasn’t there. Maybe it was Shiz. Was it Shiz? I can’t remember exactly where. Don’t pester me, Liir: I can see you’re going to pester me. I have to go.”

“Shell!” said Liir, but the man was gone in a snap of cloak and a slam of the door.

“Well,” said Trism. “I’m not seeing you home, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I am thinking no such thing. Though that coach would have been useful right now.”

“I wouldn’t take the loan of a boot from the likes of him. Bounder. I’ll hail a cab or a street chair for you.”

They walked to the front of the pub. Scrumpet Square was bright with torchlight. While Trism hailed a driver, and the cab was being brought round, Liir trained his eyes on some scraps of graffiti written with drippy paint on a public wall. He tried to bring them into focus as a way to sober up. In four different hands, applied at four different opportunities, to judge by the aging of the text, the wall read

And then

Trism dumped him in the cab and paid for it, and gave the driver directions. Then Trism disappeared back into the pub before Liir could even thank him. So Liir settled back against the moldy cushions.

Everyone lives but us.

Nor was somewhere in Shiz. Shiz. Where was that?

He would find her. He should find her. He should leap from the cab right now and go find her. He tried to sit up, but the world beyond the isinglass windows was unsettled and rolled about as if on the backs of a school of earthquakes. When he was deposited at the barracks, his feet found their way to his bunk while his head tried not to hurt, and also tried to remember what was so important.

H
E WAS HALFWAY PACKED
next morning when he recalled Shell’s comment about Nor. Through the sawteeth of his headache he grappled with the question. What to do? Packing, he paused over the cape—leave it behind, leave all the past filed in its pleats? He didn’t want to deal with that decision now, while his head hurt. Easier to pack the old thing. Easier to bind the broom’s head in a cloth so it would look less womanly, and tie the thing to the satchel laces. Postpone chucking these things out for good. Any minute now inspiration would strike. An idea would form, and as if by magic the courage to follow that idea would flare up. If only his head wouldn’t pound so!

Now’s a good time for an idea, he said, as he joined his mates in formation to receive orders.

Commander Cherrystone had not been informed about his own new assignment, it appeared, until that very dawn; he arrived at the head of the transport column with an unpinned collar and crumbs in his trim, silvering beard. His expression was thunder. He delivered his instructions in a throttled tone. No one dared ask a question. When the chaplain arrived, Commander Cherrystone didn’t join in the public atonements delivered under open skies to the Unnamed God, in exchange for the success of their mission. Whatever it might turn out to be.

“We leave in an hour,” said the Commander.

So, oh, what next? If only he had more oomph this morning! Or if he had a place to rest his head till the screech of today calmed down.

He finished clearing his trunk. Unlike all the other men, he had no private books, no mezzotints of family grandees, no clutches of letters from admonitory father or teary mother or whispery girl back home. He was bereft of the more traditional impedimenta, and determined to be proud of it.

He waited in the yard beside the basilica. What did he take of his mock parents? If Fiyero had been his dad, really, Liir had got nothing from him but a possible half-sister. No model of comportment, no word of wisdom, no wallet fattened with funds, no blessing.

If Elphaba had been his mother, he got something more—that much was sure. But what? She had acted to pervert fate, to interrupt and bludgeon history into shape—to topple the wonderful Wizard of Oz, no less—and what good had it gotten her? She was fierce and futile at everything she attempted. What kind of a lesson was that?

She hadn’t talked to him much. Only in a cast-off manner. One lunchtime she’d seethed, more to herself than to him; “It isn’t whether you do it well or ill, it’s that you do it all,” she’d said, dumping her attempt at poached eggs on the floor and hurrying back to the books and charms in her tower. That was her legacy, and it didn’t add up to much.

So perhaps he should consider the absence of good advice a kind of direction from the universe: Follow where you are led, and take it from there. Maybe fate intends to lead you to Nor. It’s gotten you this far, hasn’t it?

It was easier to be passive, easier on his brain anyway. His cohorts gathered for departure while he congratulated himself for sorting this out.

And it was indisputably thrilling to fall into formation to the punch of snare drums. The men squared their shoulders and became Men. The wind obliged by whipping the banners and emblems: it was all so glorious and immediate.

The four departing companies of the Home Guard were now colloquially named the Seventh Spear, after some magic weapon in a children’s fable that Liir had never heard told. The convoy marched in formation through the smell of sweet morning loaves, as Emerald City shopkeepers were unshuttering their windows and washing down the paving stones.

What a joy there was in movement! Liir hadn’t realized how petty he’d become, worrying daily about the gloss on his boots, the snap in his retort. The Guard’s culture had trained him into thinking that a well-brushed smile and a groomed chin were somehow vital to the preservation of the nation.

He saw the Emerald City—perhaps for the last time?—as if for the first. And how fitting it seemed that the Seventh Spear was shafting its way through the capital toward Westgate, the portal through which Liir had first made his approach. They marched past the polished half-domes and buttresses of the Wizard’s Palace—still called that, even now. The sun came out and glazed the marble; one could hardly look at it. A giant broody hen. From this angle, a distance north: the grimmer spectacle of Southstairs, lurking behind the hunched shoulders of its walls.

Everywhere else—on this boulevard, anyway—the allure of healthy commerce. Cafés catering, at this hour, to merchants on their way to their warehouses. Stalls of books, pottery, feathery remnants to adorn hats and hems. A display, arrayed under a bentlebranch arbor, of several dozen tribal carpets imported from the Vinkus, suggesting that the West was trading with the capital these days. And floral silks from Gillikinese artisans, sprays of lavender and lime, to upholster furniture in better parlors. One merchant had hung an entire chandelier, chase-worked mettanite with crystal pendants, from the bicep of a healthy oak, and he had arranged below it a dining area for eighteen—table, chairs, Dixxi House porcelain settings and silver service, with linen napkins folded to look like swans, one at each place setting.

That those who headed the nation could enjoy their meals in such luxury!—the men marched with firmer step. The vitality of the capital gave life to their cause.

The Seventh Spear turned a corner, continuing toward Westgate. Liir recognized the warehouse district through which he’d passed with Dorothy and her friends. The convoy paused while Commander Cherrystone negotiated some last-minute business with a wine merchant, and the soldiers were allowed to fall out of formation. Bleary from last night’s mistakes, Liir wandered to the brighter side of the street. He propped himself against the wall of an abandoned granary of some sort. Putting one heel against the wall, he closed his eyes and lifted his face to get some sun.

The warmth of the walls behind him, the pleasure of being between moments of his own history…his skittery mind indulged in a waking dream. His thoughts wandered up the cracked plaster walls of the corn-house. It was as if he were looking down at himself from the window on the second level. That’s me down there, that young soldier, anthracite-haired, trim, smart enough, having his moment of rest…How handsome a figure he managed to seem, from this vantage point: shoulders acceptably broad, the windblown hair on his scalp, the knee thrust forward. A soldier doing the work of the empire: a good guy.