Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02 (21 page)

Then the focus of his attentions backed up—for that fragment of an instant in which a revery implies eternity—and Liir had the sense that the young soldier at street level was out of sight again, and out of mind; and the two people who might have been looking out at him from some private aerie above had turned their attention back to each other, lovingly.

Must be the sun! Must be the beer! Filthy slutty mind he had, after all.

“Straighten out!” barked Cherrystone, and they did, and he did.

T
HROUGH
W
ESTGATE,
they turned to the south. The lads knew the habits of the sun enough to be able to tell that much. They marched as suited the Commander’s whim—more relaxed when in the rural outback, in parade formation when passing through villages. The companies tented at night, found the dried lentils and local celery exotic and filling, alternated hymns of patriotism to Oz with anthems of devotion to the Unnamed God, and didn’t bring out the bawdier ditties until Commander Cherrystone had retired for the night.

Fording the Gillikin River, they came to a broad sweep of pebbly waste, marked here and there by stands of scrub maple and pencilnut. Once they stopped for water at a kind of oasis, a mauntery of some sort, hoping that some novices would come scupper for them—lean down to reach the bucket, and show evidence of some lovely curve beneath their voluminous habits. But the maunts who supplied some succor were desiccated old biddies who had no curves to flaunt.

Liir waited to feel some frisson of recognition—could this have been the place where he and Elphaba originated? He couldn’t decide. Maybe one mauntery looked just like another. Certainly one maunt and the next seemed identical twins.

“If we’re going south or east again, wouldn’t the Yellow Brick Road give us better speed?” some wondered. But perhaps the Free State of Munchkinland hadn’t granted the necessary license.

Another opinion held that since most of the Yellow Brick Road leading south and east fell within the boundaries of Munchkinland, perhaps the final destination of the Seventh Spear was the mysterious west—Kumbricia’s Pass, or the Thousand Year Grasslands, or Kvon Altar—romantic locales, full of intrigue, exoticism, magic, sex. Everything over the horizon beckoned more temptingly than anything near.

Crossing into the eastern Vinkus, they continued through the oakhair forest between Kellswater and Restwater. Fording the Vinkus River, too, they paused on the escarpment of its southern bank. A dozen miles or more to the southwest, the Great Kells gave off a faint but redolent breath of balsam and fir. Nearer, scatterbirches in the lowland meadows shimmered in their new leaf, like chain mail on skeletons. Several hundred small grey birds flew by, brazenly low, singing their throats sore.

It felt as if the world itself were blessing the endeavor when Commander Cherrystone gave the signal not to head west toward Kumbricia’s Pass, the main route to the vastness of the Vinkus, but instead to the southeast. They would skirt the mountains and, rounding them, head south into Quadling Country.

The where, then, but not the why.

Why Quadling Country? When the Seventh Spear paused to make camp, the soldiers shared what they remembered about the southernmost province of Oz. Quadling Country was your basic muckland. An undifferentiated waste of bogs and badlands, once widely populated by the Squelchfolk, a marsh people known for their ruddy complexion and fishy odor. Hadn’t they mostly been eradicated when the Wizard had drained the wetlands in the hunt for swamp rubies? In the Emerald City you could see Quadling families from time to time. They were clanny, silent in public, making little effort to integrate. In the Emerald City they’d cornered the market on trash removal—all the funnier: trash hauling trash.

But the two larger cities of Qhoyre and Ovvels: surely something of them remained? The southern arm of the Yellow Brick Road ended in Qhoyre, and Ovvels was a nearly impassible distance beyond. A town built on stilts, Qhoyre. A town whose streets were silted with mud, Ovvels. No wonder the Seventh Spear’s administration had obliged them to include gum-rubber boots in their packs.

W
ONDERFUL WEATHER,
bracing light, cheery companionship. Now and then a free-held farm or some nobleman’s country estate would welcome the convoy. A whole stable of milk cows at one, and they had milk to drink, to pour in their coffee, to splash on their faces; they had milk puddings, cheese temptos, creamed curd, lake lobster bisque. Who needed that fancy dining ensemble for sale under the trees in the Emerald City? The soldiers ate like kings and nodded off under the willow fronds, sassy and satisfied.

One day Liir and a couple of pettys were sent to collect fresh water at the foot of a wooded dale. They paused to rest before starting back with the filled jugs yoked to their shoulders. Other topics of conversation having been exhausted, Liir asked his mates, Burny and Ansonby, about the place of husbandry in the development of new defensive systems for the Emerald City.

As it happened, Ansonby and Burny had both flirted briefly with defensive husbandry. Ansonby had worked in the veterinary arts, and Burny had helped copy some legal contracts with farmers outside the Emerald City.

“It’s supposed to be hush-hush, but everyone talks about it,” said Ansonby.

“Not to me,” Liir said pointedly.

“Well, then, I’m not sure it’s my place—”

“Dragons,” Burny interrupted. “Smallish flying dragons.”

“Dragons!” said Liir. “Nonsense. Aren’t dragons mythological? The great Time Dragon and all that?”

“Don’t know where the stock came from,” said Ansonby, “but let me tell you: I’ve seen ’em with my own eyes. They’re about yea big, wingspan the length of a bedspread. Vicious things, and hard to control. There’s a team been breeding them for a few years now.”

In the course of their military careers, Ansonby and Burny had both come across Minor Menacier Trism bon Cavalish. They had no opinion one way or the other, except that he was remote and a bit uppity. Good at his job, though.

“Which job is that?”

Ansonby said, “He’s a kind of—what would you call it? An animal mesmerist, I guess. He’s got a silky voice and is real calm. He can woo an agitated dragon into a sort of trance. Then he takes the dragon’s head in his palms. This is seriously risky, you know. The notched beak of a dragon can puncture the skin of your forearm, hook your vein, and unspool it out of your arm with a single jerk. I’ve seen it happen. No, I have. Really. Not to bon Cavalish though; he’s smooth. When the dragon’s purring, the dragoneer does something suggestible to the beast. I guess it’s about overriding the creature’s internal gyroscope, or navigational mechanism. Or just being persuasive and chummy with an attack beast. When he’s done, the dragon is directable by voice, at least for a while. Like a falcon with its falconer, a sheepdog with its shepherd. Go, come, round, back, stay, up, dive, lift, attack.”

“Retreat?”

“Dunno about retreat. They’re attack dragons.”

Liir closed his eyes. “I can’t picture a dragon, try as I might, except for something fanciful in an illustrated magazine, or a stage prop. And a flying dragon!—sounds effective. Also a little scary.”

Ansonby remarked, “Trism bon Cavalish thinks that someone came up with the idea after hearing about those flying monkeys organized by old what’s-’er-face out west. The witchy witch. What was her name anyway?”

Nobody spoke. The wind soughed and the leaves scratched against one another. “Come on then, better get on,” said Liir nonchalantly. “The water’s heavy, and it’ll be a bitch to haul. We’re rested enough.”

“Who made you boss?” said the other fellows, without offense. They dusted themselves off and began to press back to camp.

T
HERE’D BEEN NO SIGHT
of settlement nor even of a solitary hermit for days. No border marking, either, but they knew they’d reached Quadling Country by the change in landscape. Little by little the land was sinking, a series of overgrown meadows stretching for days, every few miles another half inch lower. The grasses went from emerald to the yellow of pears, and then to a ghastly sort of white, as if the fields were being tinged with hoarfrost in the height of summer.

At night they slung hammocks in stunted sedge trees, and tried to sleep, though a zillion mosquitoes emerged, and there was little protection against that. Also a soft, thumpy sort of airborne snail would constantly blunder into their faces at night, perhaps drawn by the steamy exhalation of human breath. The camp echoed with a night-long chorus of stifled girlish screeches or curses as the worm-clods landed wetly across noses, cheeks, mouths.

“No wonder this place is uninhabited,” said Burny once.

“It didn’t used to be. The Quadlings lived here,” Liir pointed out.

“It’s one huge stinkhouse. Any locals still preferring this to the rest of Oz must be cretinous. Or subhuman. En’t our old Wizard done them a favor to clear them out?”

B
UT WORM-CLODS AND MOSQUITOES
were hardly enemy combatants, and the Seventh Spear knew things could get worse. It
had
to get worse, or why were they being asked to suffer the indignity of this climate?

They gained an uncharacteristic hummock of land, a half mile across, from which the ground water had drained, more or less. Commander Cherrystone gave them permission to peel off their boots and air their feet. Eighty men scratched between their toes, where the itch was most maddening; flakes of wettish skin billowed before being borne away. It almost looked like snow.

Commander Cherrystone spoke about their mission.

“By my reckoning, we aren’t far from the outskirts of Qhoyre,” he said. “Common talk in the City treats Qhoyre as a provincial backwater, and compared to Oz’s capital, it is, of course. But it has a distinguished history of its own, predating annexation by northerners. In the modern times, there’s usually been a Viceroy stationed here to oversee. Not now. Were things calmer, we would have expected someone dispatched from Government House to serve as a translator of the native tongue, Qua’ati. We’ll do without, I’m afraid. Unless I have a secret linguist among my fine young men?”

No one volunteered.

“As I thought. It’s an ugly tongue but not hard to pick up, I’m told, if you work at it. I’m sure some of you will find yourselves fluent in a matter of weeks, and that will come in handy in due course.”

The
matter of weeks
stumped them. Also,
in due course
. Was this some sort of permanent billeting? To what end?

Commander Cherrystone explained. It seemed that the Viceroy had been abducted, and his wife had disappeared, too. No one in Qhoyre admitted to knowing who was responsible, but the indifference of the natives to the situation was unsettling to the Scarecrow’s cabinet back in the Emerald City. Quite offensively the Quadlings behaved as if life ought to go on much as normal, whether with a Viceroy or without one.

The job of the Seventh Spear was to befriend the locals, keep the public order, and—best-case scenario—identify and punish the perpetrators. If the Viceroy and his wife could be found and rescued, all the better, though he wasn’t an indispensable civil servant, apparently—otherwise he’d not have been saddled with such a hardship assignment. In any case, the brief of the Seventh Spear didn’t extend to recovery of the Viceroy; showing some muscle, however, was paramount.

“We’ll move into the city, reclaim Government House, and restore order,” he said. “There may be some bloodshed, men.”

They nodded and clutched their weapons.

“Let us bow our heads and put our holy mission of right governance in the sight of the Unnamed God.”

This, so far as it could be said for a fact, they did.

D
ISAPPOINTINGLY, THEIR RECLAIMING
of Government House involved no bloodshed at all. The toothless old woman who had set up a loom in the eastern verandah merely handed over a rusty key that had been dangling on a string around her neck. For one so plump and wrinkled, she took off at a jaunty trot. Before nightfall a cohort of youngish teenagers, possibly grandchildren, appeared in the street to haul her loom away. They left a large tray of aromatic rice, still steaming, and they tossed red blossoms on the verandah floor that, in the moonlight, looked like splashed blood.

Thus a military skirmish fizzled into a social call. The establishment of dominance proved all the more elusive because the native culture was one of deference, hospitality, and bonhomie. “This is going to be harder than I thought,” said Commander Cherrystone.

Being built large enough to be pretentious and commanding, Government House could just about domicile the entire company of the Seventh Spear. There was a lot of work to be done in terms of general upkeep, however. Cracks in the plaster, mildewing whitewash. The garden had run to seed and was a total embarrassment. How long
had
the Viceroy been gone? Or had he simply been a hapless steward of government property?

For a good price, the locals supplied acres of mosquito netting, which the men slung from hooks in the ceilings in the local fashion, cocooning each small grouping of cots. For extra protection, lengths of netting were nailed up at the windows, and a webbed arcade was erected from the kitchen door to the latrines at the back of the garden. In their smalls the men could walk to relieve themselves at night without fear of being bitten alive.

Some of the soldiers picked up Qua’ati, as Commander Cherrystone had predicted they would.

I
T NEVER SNOWED
in Quadling Country. The swamp forests held in the heat. Time seemed languorous and unchanging. How many years had they been there? Three? Four? They’d reopened a school and built a kind of surgery to augment the work of the local doctors. Some of the men had moved out of Government House, informally, and were consorting with Quadling women. This was forbidden during a campaign of occupation, but Commander Cherrystone looked the other way, for he had a common-law wife of his own by now and he hardly cared to enforce an inconvenient standard.