Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02 (4 page)

“Up, girl, up,” said the Superior Maunt. “You have been chosen by a Red Pfenix. You don’t talk much, but you understand our tongue? Just the one I need.” She offered her hand to the musician, who rose, reluctantly. The Red Pfenix nestled in the grass and set to ridding himself of lice.

“Can I send for a bowl of scented water, something? Is there a way we can offer charity to you?” said the Superior Maunt. “We don’t have visits from the likes of you often. In fact, I think never.”

“I’m only passing through,” said the Red Pfenix. “There’s a Conference farther west. But the music drew me down.”

“You love music?”

“If I loved music I wouldn’t have stopped. She doesn’t play very well, does she? No, I don’t love music; it interferes with my homing devices. I was merely curious to see an instrument like this again. The sound of her playing reminded me of a time I had seen one long ago; I’d quite forgotten. But thank you for your charity. I require nothing but a little rest.”

The Red Pfenix looked at the musician, who stood shyly in her pale grey novice’s skirts. “She’s a puzzle, that one is,” said the Red Pfenix.

“Got him!” shouted Sister Cook, coming up from behind with a snare, and indeed she had. The Red Pfenix squawked and thrashed; all the eyes in his plumage contorted. The scream was horrible. “Pfenix steaks!” said Sister Cook. “I have just the recipe!”

“Let him go,” said Mother Yackle.

It was not her place to speak next, and the Superior Maunt was irritated. She knew Sister Cook was thinking: Pfenix steaks! With knobs of butter, and tarragon mustard, and small new potatoes roasted in the same pan…

“Let him go,” said the Superior Maunt, more sternly than Mother Yackle.

“Shoot,” said Sister Cook. “I spend fifteen minutes creeping up on this bird, and with my lumbago I actually manage to catch it, and you say ‘Let him go’?”

“Do not question my authority.”

“I merely question your sense,” said Sister Cook heavily. She turned the snare over, and the Red Pfenix exploded away from the orchard, cursing.

“He was on his way to a Conference,” said Mother Yackle.

“Enough,” said the Superior Maunt. “Enough of this. Sister Cook, who is this novice? Where did she come from?”

Sister Cook was grinding her teeth in annoyance at the missed opportunity. “Candle,” she muttered. “Left here by a gypsy cousin for safekeeping, said he’d be back in a year. Either she’d be mauntified by then or he’d reclaim her, but I said I’d take her on. She causes no trouble because she can’t gossip with the other girls, and she knows how to make a mean marrow gravy. I’ve had her working with Sister Sauce on the feast day roast.”

“Can you spare her?”

“Can I spare a Red Pfenix is a better question, and the answer to that one is
no
.”

“We don’t eat Animals,” said the Superior Maunt. “I know times have changed, but it’s in our charter. We don’t eat anything that can talk back to us, Sister Cook, and if I find you have been butchering behind my back…”

“I can hardly spare her,” said Sister Cook, looking at the musician. “But if you make her take that unnerving domingon with her, I’ll call it even.”

“Domingon, is that what it is. I’d read of them, but never seen one. Come, my daughter, domingon and all.” The Superior Maunt gestured, with as tender a smile as her crabbed old mouth could assume. The girl rose. She took the Superior Maunt’s hand in an easy, unaffected way—the other girls snickered. Yes, she must be simple.

“I had come looking to ask you what you remembered of a novice we once housed—the strange green girl, Elphaba.”

“Before my time,” snapped Sister Cook, and left.

Mother Yackle scratched her nose and yawned.

The Red Pfenix was still screaming in the sky. He circled the towers of the mauntery, safe now, and recovering the ability to be affronted. He was like a clot of blood swimming above the infirmary.

“Did you say there’s a boy in the house?” asked Mother Yackle. She let her shawl slip back, and raised her bleary, milk-clotted eyes toward the Superior Maunt. “Did he bring back the broom?”

7

T
HE
S
UPERIOR
M
AUNT
was going to need a long rest after lunch, she knew: all these stairs. A certain penance regarding the joints. But she exerted herself, and Candle lent a willing arm without being asked, which was a good sign that the girl wasn’t hopelessly slow.

The sun was high enough overhead by now that the room had grown warmer and begun to sink into noon shadow. The young man lay as he had lain, twitchless, blanketed with an unnatural calm. Sister Apothecaire and Sister Doctor had brought their small chores close, so they could be nearby while they worked—Sister Apothecaire, the grinding of herbs in a mortar, and Sister Doctor the annotating of symptoms in a ledger. Sister Doctor sat on one side of the bed, Sister Apothecaire on the other.

“You know this novice?” said the Superior Maunt.

Her colleagues neither admitted familiarity, nor dissented.

“She’s a garden girl with an instrument called a domingon. I have heard of these but never see one. Apparently Candle has a small talent at music. Perhaps in the long hours on watch over Liir, she will develop it. Candle, meet Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire. You will have seen them at table or in chapel if not elsewhere.”

It was not the professional maunts’ obligation to bow, but when Candle did not bow either, Sister Apothecaire, out of social anxiety, gave a lurching sort of bob that might have meant any number of things.

To the older women the Superior Maunt said, “There are matters more pressing for you to attend to than the continual observation of our new guest. I have a different assignment for you.”

“Mother Maunt!” replied Sister Doctor. “Far be it from me to question your discernment. But I must remind you, in loyal obeisance of course, that while you govern the spirit of this House, I supervise the health of the individual souls within it.”

“As to such treatments that may be required,” began Sister Apothecaire, but the Superior Maunt held up her hand.

“I will hear no objection. Candle seems a simple soul, but she can sit here and watch the boy. She understands my instructions. If he so much as speaks, she will let someone know. She can practice her scales and perhaps grow in skill. If he is to die, let him be comforted by the peculiar drone of her instrument. This is my wish, and I have made my point.”

She cupped her hands before her in an archaic, formal gesture that meant “be it thus” or, depending on the expression of the speaker, “enough out of you, you.”

Nevertheless, Sister Apothecaire protested. “I’m well aware of this girl, she doesn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. You are making a terrible mistake—”

“In this rare instance Sister Apothecaire is correct,” said Sister Doctor. “Should any wound suppurate, or a complication develop—”

“I have other jobs for you two,” said the Superior Maunt. “Your insistence at brooking my will convinces me. You two are the ones for the next job at hand.”

They paused in their flailing, affronted and curious.

“I haven’t yet told you what I recently learned about the three missionary novices from the Emerald City who stopped here some days ago,” said the Superior Maunt. “Their small party was ambushed and they were all killed. Scraped, I’m afraid. Someone will need to find out who did the deed, and why.”

She turned. “Finish your nostrums and reinforce your binding spells at once, enough to last till dinner anyway, and come with me. I shall nap briefly instead of taking a meal, and we will convene in my sectorium when the lunch prayers are concluded.”

She was untrained in their profession. How did she know they’d used several illicit binding spells? This was why she was the Superior Maunt, they guessed. She didn’t know medicine but she knew women.

There was nothing for them to do but obey. Walking slightly in advance of them, the Superior Maunt couldn’t help but smile faintly to herself. The medical women
were
good, solid folk. They were merely curious, curious as hell, like the rest of the House. And whatever was troubling Liir, inside or out, he would recover or decline more comfortably without being smothered by the attentions of middle-aged maunts.

The Superior Maunt paused to catch her breath. Stairs were the devil. Her two colleagues respectfully froze in place while she wheezed. The willpower of women, she thought. These two, and me besides. I make the awful choice to put them in danger. If anyone can manage the task at hand, they will. Keep them safe, she prayed.

But why do I even have to put my dear sisters in jeopardy? Because my colleagues in the motherchapel dare to send young innocent missionaries into the wild—without so much as a guide. No Oatsie Manglehand for them—just faith, innocence, and courage born of stupidity. Damn the Emerald City for leaning down upon us all. Damn those—those
bath mats
in the motherhouse, for yielding to the influence of the government!

She didn’t utter a private apology for the oath. She felt she’d earned the right to swear internally, now and then. When it was warranted.

8

C
ANDLE HARDLY GLANCED
at Liir. She sat on a rush-seated chair and rubbed the calloused pads of her right fingers over the upper strings. A faint harmonic vibration buzzed in the lower strings, almost inaudible—a sensation in the air more than a sound.

The light heaved in its uncertain tides, as clouds too thin to see washed across the sky. The room chilled slightly.

Candle let her fingers wander up the frets. She was a skilled musician, more skilled even than the kitchen sisters knew—skilled, and talented besides. This domingon was missing a vital part, and couldn’t peal or chide or keen as she would like to require of it. Still, to keep her fingers alert, from the domingon’s double necks Candle drew dull incomplete sentences. They had no power to comfort; this she knew. But she would tease the lengthy imponderable sounds out into the air anyway. She had seen the Red Pfenix in the sky. So it was her playing that had called him down, was it? She could do it again, and more besides.

1

T
HE DOMINGON PLAYED ON.
Unheard by Liir in his state, it had its effect nonetheless.

H
E WAS LIVING IN THE CASTLE
called Kiamo Ko at the time, but he wasn’t present at the death of the Witch.

The Witch had locked him in the kitchen with Nanny and that jittery Lion. Showing surprising resourcefulness for one so dotty, Nanny had driven the handle of a one-egg iron skillet into the rotten wood of the doorjamb. Getting the idea, Liir and the Lion gouged at the hinges until the door fell heavily inward.

Chistery, the Witch’s Snow Monkey, had skittered ahead of them up the stairs to the Witch’s tower-top chambers. But Dorothy was already coming down, her face glutinous with tears, the badly burned broom stinking in her hands. “She’s gone,” sobbed the girl, and Liir’s heart had gone out to her—whose wouldn’t? He’d sat on the step and snaked his arm around her shoulders. He was fourteen. First attraction is awkward under any circumstances, he supposed, but this was extreme. It wasn’t as if he’d ever seen people being tender. And she was a saint from the Other Land, for pity’s sake.

The girl couldn’t control her shock, so it took Liir a while to understand what she was blubbering about. The Witch was
gone
. His earliest memory, his bête noire, his Auntie, his jail-keeper, his sage friend—his mother, the others had said, but there’d been no proof of that, and she’d never answered the question when he’d asked her.

Dead, dead and gone, and after her own inspection, Nanny wouldn’t let him up to the parapet to see. “The sight would turn the holy blind,” she murmured, “so it’s a good thing I’m an old sinner. And you, you’re just a young fool. Forget it, Liir.” She pocketed the key and began to warble in an unfamiliar mode, some dirge from her backwater childhood. “Sweet Lurlina, mother of mercy, shroud of the murdered, shawl of the missing…”

Nanny’s pagan pieties were somehow unconvincing. But on what basis could he say that? He’d left the unionist mauntery too young to absorb any of the tenets of faith that supported the cloistered way of life. From the distance of a skeptical adolescent, unionism seemed like a thicket of contradictions. Charity to all, but intolerance toward the heathen. Poverty ennobles, but the Bishops had to be richer than everyone else. The Unnamed God made the good world, imprisoning the rebellious human being within it, and taunting humankind with tinderbox sexuality that must be guarded against at all costs.

Lurlinism was no more sensible, to judge by how Nanny spoke of it. Random episodes of mildly erotic dalliance, as Lurlina effectively wooed Oz into being. Privately he thought it was downright stupid, though, being prettier, it was also easier to remember.

Perhaps he just didn’t have the feeling for faith. It seemed to be a kind of language, one whose gnarled syntax needed to be heard from birth, or it remained forever unintelligible. But he wished he had a faith now, some scrap of something: for Elphaba was dead, and to act as if the world were no more changed than if some branch of a tree had snapped off—well, it didn’t seem right.

She whipped up in his mind, the first brutal memory as sudden and insistent as a bee sting. She was yelling at him. “The Wizard’s soldiers kidnapped the whole family and left you behind? Because you were useless? And you followed after them anyway, and they
still
managed to elude you?
Are
you useless?” Even then he had known she was less angry at him than frightened at what had befallen the other residents of the castle while she was away. Even then he had known she was relieved he’d been spared by virtue of being insignificant. Even then he’d smarted at the rebuke of the term. Useless.

“I’ll take the broom,” said Liir at last. “She can be buried with it.”

“I need it, to prove she’s dead,” said Dorothy. “What else would do?”

“I’ll carry it for you then,” he said.

“You’re coming with me?”

He looked around. The courtyard of the castle was more silent than he’d ever seen it. The Witch’s crows were dead, her wolves, her bees. The winged monkeys were huddled on top of the woodshed, paralyzed with grief. With the Arjiki villagers in the settlement of Red Windmill down the slope, or scattered in cottages on the leeward side of the mountain, Liir had had little contact.

So there was nothing to keep him in Kiamo Ko but Nanny. And old as she was, she would soon lapse into her usual fog of deafness and abstraction. In a week she would forget that the Witch had died. Besides, even in her best days she’d never known where Liir had come from. Neither had she seemed to care. So it was no hardship to leave her.

“I’m coming with you,” he said. “Yes. And I’ll carry the broom.”

It was too late to leave now, so they busied themselves instead. Liir fed the monkeys. Dorothy tried to make a meal for Nanny, who wept and said she wasn’t hungry and then ate all her portion and the Lion’s besides.

After washing up, Dorothy settled cozily in the crook of the Lion’s neck, as much to calm him as to take comfort herself. Liir climbed to the Witch’s room and looked about. Already it was as if she had never lived there.

He thought of the Grimmerie, that perplexing book of magic. He had never been able to read it. Wherever the Witch had put it last, he let it be. No matter. No Flying Monkey would be able to gibber a spell out of it, and Nanny’s eyesight was too poor to decipher its odd scrambling text. It would be too heavy to carry, anyway.

Books have their own life, he thought. Let it take care of itself.

Turning to leave, he caught sight of Elphaba’s black cape. A bit worse for wear, its hems threadbare, its collar much sampled by moths. Still, it was thick, and the days would only get colder. He put it over his narrow shoulders. It was far too large for him, so he looped the ends around his forearms. He looked, he supposed, like a small silly bat with an oversize wingspan. He didn’t care.

The horizon was frosted with a greenish smear, as if ranks of campfires from distant tribes had divined the news already and were burning an homage to Elphaba before the sun could set on the day of her death.

He could smell her in the collar of the cape, and he wept for the first time.

L
IIR DIDN’T BOTHER
to say good-bye to Chistery. Let the Witch’s most beloved Flying Monkey take care of himself now. Why else had she taught him language, but so that he could keen when she was gone?

On the road, the Lion and that little yapper, Toto, lagged behind with the other two who had been waiting for Dorothy—the Scarecrow, the man of tin—both of whom gave Liir a serious case of the creeps. The wind was brutal and the streaky clouds massed to the east, and if Liir wasn’t mistaken, before long rain would fall.

Dorothy asked perfunctory questions, but she was more interested in making sure they didn’t lose their way. How would
he
know if they went off course, he asked her—it had been seven or eight years since he’d come from the mauntery with Elphaba, and he’d never left the neighborhood of Kiamo Ko in all the time since. Dorothy had much more recent experience of the greater landscape.

“Yes, well, those Flying Monkeys carried me the last bit,” she said nervously, “and I can’t claim to have had my wits about me enough to have taken note of landmarks. Still, we’re going downslope, and that’s got to be right.”

“Everything is downslope of Kiamo Ko,” Liir told her.

“I like your confidence,” she said. “Tell me about yourself, then.”

He suspected his memories of young childhood were like anyone else’s: imprecise, suggestible, and largely devoid of emotion. He didn’t recall defining moments—maybe there weren’t any—but he did remember the sensation of things. The shafts of light slanting through the mullioned windows high up in the gallery, pinning silent maunts to their silent shadows on the stone floor. The smell of asparagus cream soup, a little maple syrup drizzled on top. The smell of snow in the air. Liir had been attached to Elphaba, somehow, he remembered that: he’d been allowed to play with his broken wooden ducky in the same room where she sat and spun wool.

“Was she your mother?” asked Dorothy. “I’m terribly sorry to have killed her if she was. I mean I’m sorry anyway, but more so if you were related.”

The girl’s directness was puzzling, and Liir wasn’t used to it. The Witch had never hidden her emotions, but nor had she explained them, and in many ways living with her had been like sharing an apartment with an ill-tempered house pet.

He tried to be honest, but there was so much he didn’t know. “I started out with her,” he said. “How, as a toddler, I came to be among the maunts, I can’t say. No one has ever told me, and the Witch wouldn’t talk about it. I remember other women from those times, Sister Cupboard and Sister Orchard, and some of the more playful ones, the novices, who kept their own names, Sister Saint Grayce, and Sister Linnet. But when it came time for Elphaba to leave, they wrapped up my small packet of clothes, too, and I was lifted up to a seat on a wagon, and we joined a party that went through the Kells, stopping here and there until we got to Kiamo Ko.”

“It’s awfully out of the way,” said Dorothy, looking around at the unpeopled slopes of pine and potterpine, and the slides of scree, and the scraggles of mountain lavender going to seed.

“She wanted to be out of the way. And besides, it’s where Fiyero had lived.”

“Your father?”

Liir was as doubtful of his paternity as he was of his maternity. “He had meant something to her, to the Witch,” he pointed out. “But what, I don’t know. I never met him. Can you imagine the Witch would sit down and pour out her heart to me?”

“I can’t imagine anything about her. Who could?”

He didn’t want to talk anymore. The death was too recent, the shock of it was beginning to wear off, and what began to show through was anger. “In a general sense, we’re going southwest, and then we’ll cut east through Kumbricia’s Pass,” he said. “I’ve learned that much by listening to Oatsie Manglehand when she comes through guiding a party. There are tribes around and about.”

“We saw no one,” said Dorothy, “not for miles.”

“They saw you,” said Liir. “They had to. That’s what they do.”

“Not nice, to be spying on us. We’re very chummy,” she said, putting on an aggressively friendly face. Any party of scouts witnessing it would do well to keep themselves hidden.

Before long the rain came, and he was glad, for it stopped their conversation, which had turned into prattle. A heavy rain, the drops like pebbles. He could see no shepherd’s hut out here, not even a clump of mountain arbor to shelter beneath. So rather than sit in the mud and let the rain wick through their undergarments, they trudged on.

Their confidence about their course ebbed, though, what with the shrouding of hilltops—all landmarks wiped out of view.

“Liir, I have no confidence in your sense of direction,” said the Tin Woodman, politely.

“Nick Chopper! You’re heartless!” said Dorothy.

“Ha bloody ha. And you’re an orphan,” he replied. “I’ll rust in this downpour. Does anyone think of that? No.”

“Don’t carp. I don’t deal well with conflict,” said the Lion. “Let’s sing a song.”

“No,”
they all chorused.

“What’ll you do when you find yourself courageous—assuming the Wizard grants you what you wish?” asked the Scarecrow, to change the subject.

“Invest in the market? Join a troupe of music hall buskers? How the hell do I know?” said the Lion. “Strike out on my own, anyway, and find a better class of associates. More simpatico.”

“You?” asked the Scarecrow of the Tin Woodman.

“What will I do if I find myself with a heart?” scoffed the Tin Woodman. “Lose it constantly, I imagine.”

They slopped on. Liir didn’t think it was his place to continue the conversation, since he hadn’t been present at their initial audience with the Wizard. When no one else spoke, though, he said, “Well, Scarecrow, your turn. What’ll you do with your brains?”

“I’m thinking about it,” he answered, and would not discuss it further.

“Oh, Toto!” shrieked Dorothy suddenly. “Where’s Toto?”

“He’s wandered off to do his business,” said the Lion. “Just between you and me, it’s about time he learned to be private about it. I know you dote on him, but there is a limit.”

“He’ll be lost,” she cried. “He couldn’t find his way out of a cracker barrel. He’s not very bright, you know.”

After a respectful pause, the Tin Woodman observed, “I
think
we’ve all noticed that.”

“I hate to be obvious,” added the Scarecrow, “but you’d have saved yourself a heap of trouble if you weren’t too cheap to invest in a leash, Dorothy.”

“There he is,” she cried, pitching up a small slope.

The clueless creature was finishing his evacuation at the base of what looked like an ancient traveler’s shrine to Lurline. A weathered statue of the pagan goddess gazed blindly out into the storm. The statue was life-size, if you accepted that goddesses have the same stature as humans. Little more than a lean-to for protecting the statue from the elements, the structure could afford no room for the travelers to crawl in out of the downpour. After a while, though, Liir thought of standing on the shoulders of the Lion and slinging the big black cape out over the shrine’s roof. Using the scorched remains of the Witch’s broom as a pole, he rigged up a black tent under which they could huddle. The Lion’s mane reeked, but at least the travelers were protected from the worst of the rain.

“This cape is larger than it looks,” said Dorothy. “And the water isn’t soaking through.”

“Maybe she hexed it waterproof. She didn’t like water,” said Liir.

“So I’ve learned,” said Dorothy.

“Who does?” added the Tin Woodman, squeaking his joints.

“Tell me more about her,” continued Dorothy.

Liir didn’t oblige. He found Dorothy congenial enough—but it had been so long since he’d had anything like friends his own age! At Kiamo Ko, when he’d first arrived with Elphaba, Fiyero’s three children had allowed him into their small society, but slackly, without much interest. The girl, Nor, had been the only one ever really to play with him. Though he had been little more to Nor than that dog was to Dorothy, a presence to boss around, Nor
had
been kind. That first Lurlinemas, she’d given him the tail of her gingerbread mouse, because no one had thought to make him a gingerbread mouse of his own.