Page 163 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

He could tell the separate ages of the wood from different pieces of furniture and from the doorframes; he could even tell it was furniture and door-frames before he opened his eyes. He

knew about the mothballs in the third drawer down (he could count with his nose) and the relative moments of death of the generations of moths that had immolated themselves around the globe of an oil lamp overhead. He could tell colors too.

Time to open his eyes.

He was lying on his side. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here, or whether he’d always been an Elephant. He did remember he was a he, but his name took a little while to return. He couldn’t lift his head and he wasn’t either uncomfortable or alarmed at the situation. He reached to scratch a patch of dry skin, and the mobility of his nose surprised and delighted him, but he drifted off to sleep again before he could question why he might be surprised.

Then again, it’s always somewhat surprising to wake up and be alive again.

A doctor of some sort was shining a light in his eyes.

“He’s going to come around soon enough,” said the doctor. “Ready to have a drink, little fella?” The doctor pushed a cart with a bucket of well water too rich in the riskier algae, but fresh this hour, and Liir drank it gratefully by suctioning it through his trunk and then spraying it into his mouth, which had gone dry as bones and felt in need of a good gingerscotch gargle.

“Can you speak?” asked the doctor, a little man who was standing on a stool. A Munchkinlander physician.

Liir thought he might be able to, but didn’t answer. He needed to remember more before he spoke.

The next time the door opened, a woman came through it. She was taller than the physician by double, with a head of flaxen-rose hair and a stern and loving expression. “They have said you’re making progress, Liir Thropp,” she told him. “I am La Mombey Impeccata, the Eminence of Munchkinland. I should like you to sit up now and pull yourself together.”

He thought about it, and then heaved himself over by rolling back and forth like an old dog. Under the low table on which he rested, the newly installed supports made of tree trunks creaked, and sawdust sifted onto the slate floor beneath the table.

“You ought to be coming out of your stupor now. I calibrated the semblance of death to last only so long. Can you hear me?”

He couldn’t remember why there might be a reason to hesitate, but he erred on the side of caution. He could smell high intention in her pheromones, and duplicity, and mastery, superscribed with patchouli and underlit by garlic chive.

“I need your help and I need it quickly. I have the power of life and death over your wife and your daughter.”

He could smell the lie, but knew it lay soon enough to the possible truth to be important to consider.

“Nothing has been done to you that you cannot outlive, and much good will come your way if you cooperate. We are within striking distance of the conclusion of this sorry war. The quicker you decide to help, the fewer people will fall. The fewer Animals will die. As I have made you a Black Elephant, I can keep you that way, or I can have you shot like the skark you saw my men take down. It’s your choice. Every moment you delay your return to full consciousness and due diligence is a moment that soldiers put their lives on the line, waiting for you. And a moment nearer to the forced repatriation of your daughter, who is after all, going back a generation or three, a frond of Munchkinland, just as you are yourself. Have you any questions?”

He had a few questions, but he didn’t ask them of her.

She turned to leave. He could smell her dress whispering comments of straw brushing along the slate. The soap that had not been rinsed out well four washings ago. He could smell her anger and her cunning. What he couldn’t smell—and, if he’d ever really been a human man, he didn’t recall having been able to smell it then, either—was the lure of power, the attractiveness of it. He seemed bereft of a certain lust for strength and dominance. He didn’t think the lack had pestered him much.

Unless its absence had put his family in danger all too often. There was that.

At the door, she said, “I know about you. Not as much as I will, not as much as I’d like, but enough. I know you have hesitations and you also have capacities. I know you admire the Elephant as a creature and you consider hiding inside. I know about Princess Nastoya and your campaign years ago to release her from her spell. Who do you think she first turned to, all those decades past, for a charm to give her the guise of a human being? Mombey Impeccata, at her service. I am the foremost master of forms and shapes in all of Oz. Go up against me, Liir, and you will see what form and shape of vengeance that I take against you.”

He closed his eyes. He had already died as a human being, and in fact it hadn’t seemed a noticeable effort. If the time came to die as an Elephant, maybe he would come across Princess Nastoya in the Afterlife. Maybe after all this time he might meet up with Elphaba Thropp again, his so-called mother. He could give her a piece of his mind. He could give her a great thumping with his trunk for being such a bitch.

He smelled time passing as he slept, and learned as he slept to smell it in minutes and hours as well as in warmths and darknesses.

Then he was stronger, and more Liir, more aware of himself as the old Liir inside the Elephant skin, though a changed Liir in ways he still couldn’t smell. There’s a reason we live in time. We are too small a flask, even as an Elephant, to tolerate too much knowing. Instead, truth must drip through us as through a pipette, to allow only moments of apprehension. Moments diffuse and miniature enough to be survived.

The door opened again. Now that he was more aware of hearing, he tried before turning his head to hear who it might be. The little physician? The maid, Jellia Jamb? Or La Mombey herself? If La Mombey, could he smell her as a blonde, or as a Quadling with that plaited dark hair like Candle? Or as a chestnut-coiffed karyatid with lilacs and turquoises in her headpiece?

He didn’t believe what he smelled, so he rolled over and turned his head. His eyes were the least strong of his senses so far, but he strained to focus as well as he might.

The man stood at the door, light glaring around him. The Elephant’s eyes stung for a moment, and so tears stood, but they were tears of ocular pain and adjustment, not of emotion. Not on Liir’s part, though maybe on Trism’s. “Is it you, or is it another of her tricks?” asked the Elephant’s old lover.

Liir might have asked the same, if Mombey had used a semblance of Trism to trick Liir into a confidence, but his nose was strong enough to tell this was Trism, no disguise. He remembered the smell of every follicle root, every breath, every fold and crevice, every secretion and hesitation. The sight and the knowledge took Liir’s breath away, but when it came back, his voice came back with it.

“It is I,” he said, “more or less. Rather more, I should guess. I mean, I’d actually gotten wiry since I last saw you, up until recently when I seem to have put on a few pounds.”

Trism closed the door. He came across the room, but stood outside the range of Liir’s waving trunk, which was raking in ten years’ worth of nasal history, satisfying the longing Liir had so long denied himself the right to feel.

“Why are you here?” asked the Elephant.

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