Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02 (26 page)

The room was a wheel, and he imagined it spun around him, but then that was him turning, wasn’t it, turning so his eye could fall on everything at once. He had looked unsuccessfully for the Grimmerie once before. Now he was taller, and his eye better trained: perhaps he would make it out lying slumped on some shelf, or stashed on top of a cupboard.

He didn’t see it. Maybe he just didn’t want to see it, for it would only reinforce the murkiness of his origins. Elphaba had been able to read that book, to decipher its skittering language somehow, but few else had—maybe no one else. He didn’t know. He had been good at Qua’ati, but to master a foreign language of magic was another business entirely. Hell, he hadn’t even been able to tie his own shoes until he was ten.

Expecting little, he pushed aside furniture, looked under the mildewed cushions of the window seat. The wardrobe was locked, but he found a skeleton key in a chipped teacup and worried the latch open.

Inside hung a few dresses, mostly in the black that the Witch favored. There were no shelves, and no Grimmerie hidden beneath a secret floor. Just a pair of boots. He pulled them out and looked at them.

They were expensively cut and pieced, made of some supple leather that had been well treated. Where the boots had folded a bit, there were only eyelash cracks. A gentleman’s boots, Liir realized. Elphaba kept a pair of men’s boots under lock and key?

He felt inside them. One was empty. The other yielded a piece of curling paper about eight inches square. He took it to the window and flattened it on his knee so he could make it out.

A sketch of Nor. No mistake about it. The chin was all wrong, and the eyes too close together, but the joyful tilt of the head, the way the hair whipped off the brow—it could be no other. Liir could see the artist’s tentative first lines corrected by definitive cross-hatching in a kind of drypoint, with highlights of coffee-colored wash. Maybe the artist had spilled some coffee on purpose and rubbed definitions in with a finger. Elphaba?

He turned the paper over. On the back, in a crude, distinctive hand, was scrawled

So Elphaba had kept it—as another token of Fiyero, maybe, something from his hand. And perhaps also because she had admired Nor a little, in her own way—to the extent Elphaba could admire any child. Nor had had spunk.

He turned his head to avoid any more of that kind of thinking. The light from the window worked a glint upon a kind of bowl of glass. A ball, really. He rubbed the dust from it; it played like a bright spatter of sunlit rain as he cleaned it.

He found a low stool with five legs, each carved with its own representative foot: a dwarf, an elf, a human, a bird, and an elephant. He drew the stool close and sat down with his chin in his hands.

Lifting his chin this way and that, looking at himself slantwise. Did his chin have a sharp line to it, was his nose sloping and stabbing as Elphaba’s had been? Was his skin the color of her brother Shell’s? Whatever efforts or accidents had brought him into the world—was he worth it? And if so—worth it to whom? He was poised as a girl preparing for her first party, trying to see her own loveliness. He didn’t care for loveliness, one way or the other: but he looked for something that might stand in its stead. Something like merit. Capability.

If only she were still alive to tell him something, anything.

A cloud passed before the sun. The room shook a little, adjusting its outlines. The ball darkened and brightened again. He took it in his hands, the old thing, scratched and crazed, and cracked along several seams. It looked as if it had once been a flat bit of glass, and someone had heated it, thinned and curled and patched it into this makeshift gazing ball. A miracle it hadn’t fallen apart. The shapes within shifted as he tilted it this way and that, to try to surprise himself by a new aspect. Catch a new angle, learn a new regret. Anything.

He leaned down and breathed against it, and quickly wrote his name with his finger in the condensation. It dissolved into shapes, his reflection no longer sharp-lined, but foggy. Colored blobs like tossing petals. Then they resolved. The lines he saw were not the carved cornices of the wardrobe or the line where the ceiling met the walls. Instead he saw a skylight, and walls of old cracking plaster, and a white cat observing from the top of a crate. A man moved out of the margin of the mirror, turning his tunic inside out in his haste to remove it. He was dark and beautiful; Liir knew enough about the beauty of men to tell this. He circled an arm about a woman and drew her toward the wall, where he leaned down to kiss her. Then the man turned to open a wide double-doored window, and a flood of light that was never seen in the tower at Kiamo Ko burned into the room in the mirror.
(Liir the young soldier was outside, heading for Quadling Country, daydreaming in the sun.)
Their forms were indistinct in the sun flooding around them into the room. The woman pulled back, away from the window frame, and raised her arms around the man. Her face was hidden. Her arms were green.

Liir set the mirror gently down. He turned as if to say to the white cat,
Hush, that’s private
—but the white cat was in the mirror, of course.

Elphaba. Elphaba and Fiyero. Elphaba once upon a time, maybe not much older than Liir was now. And Fiyero, Fiyero for sure. In the light of that distant memory, captured somehow in a looking glass, one couldn’t mistake the pattern of blue diamonds that had been incised into Fiyero’s skin. Liir had envied how Nor had spoken so affectionately of her father’s blue-diamonded skin.

Liir didn’t want to see more. He was too constricted for prurience of any sort, much less this kind. But he was young and normal—too normal—so of course he had to look again. He was relieved to find that the circumference of the ball was misting up, and in any case the picture was different. It was the Witch now, the woman he had known so well—fiercer, less forgiving, more impatient, more focused. She was slapping the pages of the Grimmerie, looking for something she couldn’t find. Then she closed the book with a
whomp
so hard the globe almost rocked on its stand, even now, at the memory of it.

She turned and raised a crooked arm in the air above her, and her mouth was open, but he could hear no sound; and the broom came rushing forward, dragging its hems across the floor. The Witch wrenched it with one strong hand and settled her rump firmly against the tied top of the brush. They rose as a single instrument and left the room through the broad window. The Great Kells—as they were a dozen or so years ago, as they were today—seemed like fans of lavender and ice in the distance, and he could make out her path for a few more seconds, trading on the currents of the wind, after an impossible prize.

H
E SAID HIS
good-byes to Nanny, though she seemed mercifully vacant this afternoon. “Tell ’em all to go to hell,” she advised. “And save me a good seat by the racetrack when they get there.”

Chistery saw him out. “You’ve no need to take this on yourself,” he repeated.

“She would,” he said.

“You aren’t her; you can’t be, and shouldn’t try.”

“Try to be her, or try to be me? There is a difference. Of course there is. But I’ve got the broom now, haven’t I? So who else should do it?”

Chistery shrugged.

“If the Princess of the Swans was presiding over a Conference of the Birds, so that the flying creatures of the world could share what they knew about the trouble ahead, you know who would be there. She would. She flew on a broom. She qualified. So I’ll go in her stead. I may not have her blood, but I have her broom. I’m all there is.”

“Go with the winds,” said Chistery. “Shall I save supper?”

Liir put on Fiyero’s boots. Hadn’t he earned them?

Or perhaps not. He took them off again and replaced them in the wardrobe. But he did take the drawing of Nor, and fold it up, and tuck it in an inside pocket of the cape, from where it could not blow away.

He climbed to the windowsill in her old study and threw himself out, trusting that the broom would remember its mission. His eyes closed against the fall, and the crows sheltering under the eaves screeched in shock and terror. The broom stumbled and pitched, rolled and yawed, but Liir kept his boots kicked firmly in the straw and his hands iron-tight around the pole. When after the first few seconds he had not yet whumped into the side of Knobblehead Pike, he opened one eye.

The landscape was a broken thing from this high up. The mountains looked like mud, swept into ridges and painted white and brown and grey and green. Thin flat lines of polished silver: rivers threading along the valley floors. Almost as far as the eye could see, the Kells curved north. The horizon beyond them was white as sugar crystal where the sun made some fun of its own.

To the south, Kumbricia’s Pass was out of sight, hidden by the shoulders of mountains between, but it wouldn’t be hard to find from this height.

He wheeled about, vaguely southward, leaving Kiamo Ko for the second time in his life. He didn’t look back, for the whipping black cape would interfere with his view anyway. To the east, invisible still, the Emerald City, and all that went on there. To the south, a flat plate of greenish brown. Maybe Kellswater in the distance already? That would put Nether How beneath him, and the five lakes west of the Vinkus River. He hadn’t the nerve to look down, however; looking out and across was just barely tolerable.

He saw the first sign of the moon, and the weird hump of a snout it had. The jackal moon, Nanny had told him; she’d hoped to get another jackal moon in her long life. There it was, his first, or the first he could remember anyway. It lay on the horizon to the southeast like a dog with its nose on the threshold, barely obeying the instruction to stay outside. It had a cold and a personal look to it.

The wind played tricks in his ears: now a soughing like the breath of a man in distress, now an indistinct glissando almost as of fingers on purely tuned strings. From here one could see nothing of the works of man in the world, and it was the more beautiful for it: how odd, then, that the wind should still sound like human music. Or was it that human music sounded more like the wind than people could possibly know?

On his right, coming over the Kells from the west, three or four clots of dark matter, indistinct because of the light and the wispy streakiness of the skies. He paid the flotsam no mind until a skein of cloud parted and they were nearer. Larger than he’d guessed; now he could see they were still rather far off. But gaining in speed; and gaining on him, slicing toward him in a wide curvet like hounds let loose on the side of a meadow, and he the fox already moving broadly down its middle.

He used the force of his thumbs to press the wood of the broom pole down, and as if possessed of a mind, or as if it had become part of his own body, the broom obliged, and he lost altitude in a hurry. The larger creatures would have a hard time adjusting their speed and height, he thought, and he was right; they were less nimble. But the air below was thicker with the water vapor and breath of forest. What they’d lost in maneuverability, the hunting birds made up in greater weight; they plunged toward him.

Farther, and he dropped farther still, each time catching some small advantage, to lose it within a few minutes. The four birds now penned him in the air: two keeping slightly forward and below, one coming on his left. Above—he could feel it with his peripheral judgment rather than see it—the final one. And closing in fast, to judge by the pair of shadows that he could see racing along the flatlands below: his shadow and his pursuer’s.

There was nothing to lose by an attempt to buck sideways and zigzag; with luck two of the dedicated missiles might collide, and each one knock the other unconscious. But the broom didn’t seem responsive enough. A small amount of jerking up and kicking back made little difference. The farther the drop, the slower the broom’s response: the more resistance put up by the moods of the climate.

Now above the horizon the jackal moon was staring. It had risen as Liir had descended, and their relative positions were reversed. It was the head of a predator on the crouch, and he was the prey trying lucklessly to make it to a mouse hole of one sort or another.

The first attack was of talons, so Liir thought, eagles? Massive eagles—and the second attack was by a tooth or a beak, which might have meant anything. It ripped off the cape as if calmly unknotting it. Then Liir turned to beat at the creature with his arms, since encounter was inevitable, and he came face-to-face with a flying dragon. Roughly the size of a horse, with wings of black and gold, and a venomous eye of gold shot through with black where red should be.

The other dragon neared, and the two of them made their nab neatly, tossing Liir between them as his clothes shredded and his voice raveled. Then, having worried him at last from the broom, they let him fall, and retired with their spoils.

1

H
E HAD HAD EVERY INTENTION TO DIE,
and music had forbidden it. He’d been netted by melody not so much beguiling as nagging. That’s what he thought, when he could think about it. Though it was another few hours or days (he couldn’t count either) before even this much came clear to him.

What he remembered from before his fall from the sky was imprecise at best, and its emotional character muted. Panic over the sight of a girl being slung from a burning bridge…disgust at realizing what Shell had been up to in those cells at Southstairs. Consolation at seeing a stag at the far side of a field in early autumn. Panic, disgust, consolation—cheap souvenirs from a holiday. Emotions were portable and obvious: small savories of a life, suitable for kicking his mood upswing or down as the moment required. False, somehow.

But he and his memories alike had awakened into a new capacity of pain and grief. He had awakened to find himself alive again, damn it. Couldn’t he even fall from a great height and expect the comfort of a quick death? Need Feckless Liir march on yet again?

Though marching was hardly what he was doing, in literal terms, as he tossed, and kicked the sour blankets in this abandoned mill building or industrial outpost, wherever it was she had taken him.

The girl was named Candle, she said. She spoke to him colloquially in Qua’ati.

She brought him water from a well outside. He could hear the squeak of the pulley as the bucket went down, came back. She brought him nuts and moss apples, which gave him a stentorian diarrhea at first, but cleaned him out and started him up again, and before long he was able to sit up. Then get up and piss in a pail. Then walk to the window and rub a shaky hand against the dirt on the glass, and circle a clean space with his palm, and look out.

His resting room was off the kitchen of a small compound: a few stone domestic buildings connected to dependences built at right angles to one another. In the yard he saw the laundry cart to which Candle and that ferociously old maunt had dragged him. Now the donkey was unhitched and was grazing nearby in an overgrown orchard, braying opinions about nothing in particular. Within a couple of days, out on her scouting adventures, Candle had come up with a hen, too, and once the hen grew familiar with her new home, there were eggs in the morning.

“Is it a farmhold?” he asked her.

“It was once,” she said in her half-a-voice. “Old apple trees in the woods, and dozens of barrels in a shed. I think it had been a cidery. But it seems to have been fitted out for industry of some sort since. I’ve found a…a heap of machinery standing in the high main barn. It’s been hacked with sledgehammers and I can’t guess what job it was meant to perform. When you can get around better, you can tell me what you think.”

Beyond the orchards and a few overgrown pastures, as far as he could tell, they were surrounded by a forest. By day it was the color of a hundred fawns, every afternoon brighter as more leaves fell and the light sank nearer to the ground. By night, owls hooted, and in the ceaseless wind the branches made sounds like coughing.

He dozed much of the day and lay awake next to her much of the night, when she fell into a sound sleep. She showed no sign of restlessness. But then, he couldn’t play an instrument to trouble her dreams. The domingon, if that’s what it was called, hung on the wall like an icon.

“Why did you rescue me?” he asked her. She couldn’t answer the question; she seemed not to understand the concept of rescue, though the word in Qua’ati could mean nothing else. “Who are you?” he tried, another way of posing the earlier question. The reply, “Candle,” nothing else, gave him something close to comfort, but it was not comfort, quite.

Another time he asked, “Why did we flee that place?”

“The old maunt told us to go. She said they would hunt for you sooner or later.”

“They? Who?”

“Perhaps I misunderstood. Anyway, she said you were in danger. She had heard tell of this abandoned place and gambled that the donkey would find the way. Indeed, it did.”

“I am still in danger? Then I’d have been safer if you’d let me die.”

“I didn’t cause you to live or die,” she said. “Don’t give me credit for skills beyond me. I played music; you remembered. Music will do that. What you remembered—that was within you, and nothing to do with me.”

But he wondered, as he grew stronger. So many of his memories included an offstage trickle of melody, like marginalia embroidering a page of manuscript. He hardly recognized himself in the glass of the window, when at night he took a candle to the black pane to see who he was now. Gaunt, and stubbled, almost palsied with the weakness of the infirm. Had her playing helped him to remember his life as it had been lived, or had she enchanted him with music and given him a false past?

He could be anyone, this could be anywhere. He might be mad, and not even know it. There might be no Emperor, no dragons, no broom—no castle of Kiamo Ko before that, no Nor abducted from it a half a lifetime ago. No occupying force in the provincial capital of Qhoyre. No parents slinging their daughter clear of the burning bridge. Candle might have riveted his comatose mind with a battery of pretend memories so as to distract him from something more important.

Though she spoke Qua’ati, and so did he. She wasn’t likely to be that skilled a player that she could have taught him a whole new language in his coma.

2

T
HE FIRST NIGHT HE COULD MANAGE IT,
they pulled two chairs into the open doorway to watch the stars come out. “Tell me about yourself,” he said.

She lit a candle, charmingly. Even more wonderfully, she pulled a bottle of wine from out of nowhere. “Mother Yackle gave it me, along with a few other things filched from the mauntery’s pantry,” she admitted. It took some ingenuity to remove the cork, but when they’d succeeded, they sat with their legs entwined, and sipped from old clay mugs with broken handles.

She told of her past. He tried to listen. After a while he realized that he was waiting for clues to prove that he had been comatose for several years, not merely weeks. He wanted her to be the Quadling girl tossed from the bridge at Bengda, grown up and magically restored not just to life but into
his
life. How he wanted to provide for her—to begin the impossible task of reparation.

It was hard to shake off this hope, but in order to hear of Candle’s real life, he had to try to still his own rackety guilt.

Candle was raised in Ovvels, in all of Oz the southernmost town of any size. Well, hardly a town, as she described it: a network of cabanas built in the rubbery limbs of suppletrees above the salty damp of flooded groves. As a child she hunted charfish with her spear. Like most of Quadling Country, her settlement had become economically blighted in the decades of the Wizard’s ascendancy. She thought prosperity must once have been possible here: great tiers of granite blocks, eighteen feet at their highest, were set together in long broad curves. One could have driven a horse along the top for nearly a mile. Nobody alive could imagine what such massive structures had been used for, nor how they had been erected; there was no granite anywhere nearby. The locals used the place for fixing their marsh nets and for drying fish.

Beyond that, Candle had little else to say. Her father had lit out long ago, her mother being rather wiftier than was useful in a wife. Food had grown scarce, and some of her relatives had set out to try their luck as itinerants. She’d learned to play the domingon while traveling with her uncle.

“But how did you come to stay in a mauntery?” asked Liir. “The Quadlings aren’t unionists.”

“In general, Quadlings are inexpressive about holy matters,” said Candle, “which means they’re not easily offended by other traditions. However, you’re wrong about southern Quadlings. A whole passel of Quadlings from Ovvels converted to a kind of unionism several generations ago when a missionary and his entourage came through. I heard my great-grandmother speak of it once. A sickly group of do-gooders, prone to being afflicted with mold in our climate. Frankly, it’s a wonder they had any effect. But they did. I was raised on a cushiony variety of unionist thought, so I don’t mind the chapel and the devotions that the maunts engaged in. Nor the custom of caring for the sick, either. It seems a decent way to spend one’s hours.”

“You played for me on that—domingon. Where is it from?”

“It was a gift of my uncle,” said Candle tersely, and would answer no further questions on the subject of the instrument or her uncle, either.

“You cared beautifully for me.” Liir noted the rue in his voice. “I remember what it was like to fall through the air and see the ground rush up with a speed you can’t imagine. It was all a brown blur of wind and earth.”

“I couldn’t have saved you if you had fallen very far,” said Candle. “Likely you imagine it worse than it was.”

“But my bones are healed. I can move,” he said. “I didn’t bleed to death.”

“The maunts who tended you first were more capable than they let on. In any case, I am still not clear on why you came to be airborne,” said Candle.

He ripped the skin off a wild winter orange she had found in the woods somewhere. The pungency stung his nose with eclipsing sweetness. “With all I seemed to relive in my dead sleep, there’s a lot I can’t remember,” he said at last.

“Do you remember what happened to your broom?”

“I suspect it fell to the ground. I’m not sure. Or maybe the dragons took it, though why they’d bother I can’t imagine.”

She didn’t press him further. It was Liir who did the asking. “Why did you take me away from there? Why did that one you called Mother Yackle lock us in the tower together, and release us when she did? What did she say to you about it?”

“Mother Yackle is well known to be wandering in her mind. In the short time since I arrived at the mauntery, I never knew her to cause trouble nor even, often, to speak. Somehow your arrival engaged her, though whether it was into a further madness or a mysterious clarity, I can’t say. Perhaps we were locked in so…”

“Finish your thought.”

She couldn’t, or wouldn’t. She merely smiled at Liir. “It’s nice to speak Qua’ati again. They thought I was simple at the mauntery. I didn’t mind that, really; I suppose I am simple. And my small voice doesn’t lend itself to public utterance. But I find it is nice to speak with words again, as well as with music.”

“How did you learn your skill with music?”

“We all have skills,” she said. “I mean the Quadlings from Ovvels do. They emerge in different ways. We can—see things—is that how to put it?”

“Can you see the future?” said Liir. He gripped her hand. “What is our future?”

She blushed a little; he hadn’t known a Quadling who could blush. “It isn’t like that,” she answered. “I can tell you—I suppose—a little bit about the present. It’s not the future.”

“Tell me about the present,” he said.

“I did already.” She pouted, a jest only. “I sat by your side for days and days and played the domingon to you. It gave you your present.”

“You gave me memory. That’s the past.”

She corrected him. “Memory is part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our heart pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work, too: it keeps us who we are. It is the influence that keeps us from flying off into separate pieces like”—she looked around—“like this peel of orange, and that clutch of pips.”

“Play for me again.”

“I’m tired of playing,” she said. “For now, anyway.”

Before they went back inside, they explored the high-ceilinged barn. “I’ll look again in better light tomorrow,” said Liir after poking around a bit. “But I think this was a printing press.”

“Out here in an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere?” said Candle.

“Maybe it printed seditious tracts,” said Liir. “Someone didn’t like what it was being used for, and expressed that opinion with an ax and a hammer.”

“From pressing cider to publishing broadsides.”

“Both are presses. This is Apple Press Farm. I’m naming it.”

They retired. Candle fell asleep quickly. Liir rolled up against her for warmth. I am not a soldier any longer, he said to himself; this is not my Qua’ati girlfriend. He stiffened, as a man will, but took pains to govern the appetite. She was his rescuer and not his concubine. He might be infected with something contagious, and he wouldn’t endanger her that way.

When it seemed that the sweet lettucey smell of her breathing, the roll of her breast in the moonlight was too much to bear—that he would sink his mouth upon it—he turned onto his side. A minute or two of envisioning the burning bridge at Qhoyre was all it took to restore him to the sadder state in which he’d spent most of his life.

3

I
N NOON LIGHT,
the mess in the main barn proved more severe. Dozens of trays of letters used by compositors in a back room—once a milking stall maybe—were overturned on the floor. The wheels and weights and great drum of the press proper, cabineted in well-oiled oak and well-blackened brackets and footings of iron, had been gashed, and fairly recently, by swords or axes. The metal cuts gleamed with as yet untarnished brilliance.

They saw no sign of blood. Perhaps the obscure printers had gotten wind of an assault and cleared out in time.

Liir poked about in the charred rubble of the barn hearth. He managed to dislodge a few scraps of a broadsheet. He pointed to the words, but Candle said that she couldn’t read the script.

“‘Pieties of the Apostle,’” Liir told her. “That’s the heading. Here, beneath, it says ‘The Virtue of the UGLY.’”

“I didn’t know the ugly had special virtue,” said Candle, “just a sort of misfortune.”

The print was small and Liir had to carry it to the open door in order to make it out. “It seems a blameless sort of religious tract, near as I can tell.”

“Perhaps the press was used for more incendiary publications, too.”

“Maybe.” He rubbed away char and declaimed from the parchment: “‘The Apostle boasts no special skill. For his humility the Unnamed God has blessed him with the reward of untroubled conviction.’”