Page 69 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

She liked stealing things, though most of what she stole she threw away. To rescue it, to liberate it. The glossy pink shell, with its spiraled belt of spikes and its silky silvered mouth, was an exception. She kept waiting for it to talk to her.

When Mr. Boss protested that his little people were disappearing, Little Daffy replied, “I think they’re disgusting, but don’t look at me.” The Munchkinlander whiled away the hours trying to teach such advanced medicine as she could to the local fish doctors, though with limited resources her efforts were lacking in smack. The Quadlings took to the Munchkinlander as if she were a kind of toy grandmother. Rain heard Brrr mutter that Little Daffy was having too much fun and wouldn’t want to move on when and if the sun ever returned.

“You think I’m just a rural squash,” the Munchkinlander snapped at the Lion. “You think I’m drunk on exotica. You think I’m going native. Maybe you’ve heard that when I helped my old colleague and nemesis, Sister Doctor, tend to that ailing Scrow potentate, Princess Nastoya, I fell in love with the Scrow. Well, it’s true. I could’ve stayed there. But I had my calling.”

“I’m your calling now, honeybag,” said Mr. Boss. “Don’t you forget it.”

“You kidnapped me,” she told him. “But bygones be gone, as they say.”

Little Daffy gave up running a rural clinic and took to playing a kind of strip canasta with a bordello of Quadling maidens possessed both of loose clothing and morals. When Mr. Boss tried to peer in the shutters at them, she called him a perv and slammed them shut. Then the giggles! The dwarf sulked for a week, fouler than usual.

“Get away from that window or you’ll go blind,” he growled at Rain, who was just passing, minding her own business.

She didn’t answer him, just slid on by. Watching. Adults were more broken than animals, she thought. She missed the birds of the sky, the big birds: in the jungle, only sodden little feather-fluffs hopped from branch to dripping branch under the jungle canopy.

Every now and then she went to look at the Clock, to see if it had wakened up. She was the only one to visit it as far as she knew, but the thing stayed frozen, dead as one of the dwarf’s ugly carvings.

For Brrr’s part, the months of inaction made him consider that the one thing that had characterized his life since infancy was his constant motion. No matter how much he’d enjoyed life among the great and the good in Shiz or the Emerald City, he wasn’t a house Lion at heart. He was a roving beast. Maybe his lifelong tendency to take umbrage at minor slights was a symptom of his chronic eagerness to get going somewhere else. He only ever needed a good reason.

He wouldn’t leave Ilianora, though. He could tell this waiting was hard on her too. Waiting for what? The book—they had kept trying to open it—offered no further advice. Meanwhile, Ilianora’s veil, which for so long had stayed down, was raised again, in more ways than one. She lived in a new silence, and slept with her back to him. They’d never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they’d been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love.

So Brrr was cross, too. Everyone was more or less cross except for Rain.

The Quadling children tried to make friends with Rain, but she felt unsure of their intentions. Anyway, they didn’t like the otters, who bit children when provoked. Though Tay never so much as nibbled at Rain. Except a little. And it hardly hurt.

Alone most of the day, Rain was turning into a little monkey on the vines and trestle-passes of the supplewood trees. Tay scurried along behind her like a kind of white trailing sock. Brrr watched her with cautious eyes. She was growing, their Rain. Her limbs liked this damp climate. Ilianora had had to sacrifice another veil to make a longer tunic for the girl, lest she flash her private parts by accident and invite a disaster.

Just in time, before a couple of marriages broke irreparably, the sun returned. Steamy yellow and obscure white. It hurt their eyes. With it arrived new generations of biting bug who were impervious to the few remaining sachets of unguent the companions had harvested more than a year earlier. It would be time to get moving before long. “What’re we waiting for?” asked Ilianora.

“For a sign of some sort,” said Mr. Boss.

“You’re not over that yet? The Clock is broken. There are no signs.” Her tone was aggrieved in a cosmic way. The dwarf rolled his eyes.

The painted fish looked now as if they were swimming in light instead of streaked green air. Early one morning Rain caught sight of an etiolated matron touching up one of the fishes with some blue paint ground up in a gourd. She was dabbing with her fingers and singing to herself. This old flamingo had never seen a big fish like that, but still she had the temerity to instruct it to swim for another year?

Strange. Another lie, thought Rain.

“We don’t have a prophecy from the Time Dragon, we get no reading from the Grimmerie,” said Mr. Boss one day. “The sun is our alarmus. We’re off and away with the piskies. Let’s unshroud the Clock and oil the axles and it’s hey, hey, for the open road. The book don’t like it, let it give us some better advice.” He got no argument, except from Little Daffy, who had to be encouraged to swaddle her breasts again. “I’m going to miss the old damp hole in the wall,” she said, sweeping it out with that Munchkinlander frenzy for housecleaning. “If we ever retire, darling Mr. Boss, perhaps we can come back here for our sunset years?”

He didn’t answer. He was cheery for once, swarming as high up the Clock as he could, though he was no match for Rain.

All of Ovvels gathered to see them drag the Clock out of its tomb. However feeble the Qua’ati that the companions had managed to learn in a year, it served well enough for good-byes. A berdache of some sort, a smeary-eyed young man with pinkened lips, made a speech hearkening back to some time when another troupe of northerners had come through and lived with them for a while. Before his day, but it was local lore. “They to try convince us to believe in something they say is not there,” he said, “the god who is unnamed.”

“Missionaries,” said Little Daffy, who had put her own past behind her with dizzying alacrity. But “Couldn’t you just puke?” had to do for social comment, and after that she kept her mouth shut.

“We did not to kill them,” said the berdache. “Minister come to educate and steal our souls for his god who won’t to name itself. Rude man. Man of moldy thought. But he has girl with him we do not forget.” He smiled at Rain as if she were that girl, and he wasn’t discussing something that happened a hundred thousand years ago in folk memory but this very week. “He has little green girl with him. His oldest girl. She to sing for him, when we to harvest vegetable pearl. She sing the pearl off the vine. I am not there but she is like you.” He nodded to Rain.

The others bowed to Rain. She put her shell up to her head and turned away, as if she preferred its windy noise over their attention.

Brrr said, “How can you know our Rain is like that girl if none of you were alive back then?”

The man shrugged. He indicated to Ilianora that he would accept the gift of her scarf. She didn’t hand it over. Sighing, he answered Brrr as best he could anyway. “Some Quadlings to have sense to see the present, to know the present,” he finished. “We to see your young rafiqi girl and we to know she is the one they talk about.”

“I to see myself into a loony bin in about one minute,” said Mr. Boss. “Let’s go.”

Brrr wondered what they saw when they looked at Rain, and why they waved at her so affectionately when for a year she hadn’t given them the time of day. Of any day.

“Aren’t you going to show us the Clock?” asked the berdache. “Before you go?”

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