Page 47 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“Right. And maybe the stars are really the toenail cuttings of the Unnamed God. Don’t talk about that which you don’t bloody get, Sir Pussykit.”

So even history can get tired too, thought Brrr. How many futures has the Clock told in its time? It’s been humping around Oz for what, thirty, forty, fifty years now? And the dwarf slaving in attendance to it except during the periods when the Clock was hidden in some crevice of Oz, and the dwarf could go out and live something of a life? “Well, if you can’t start it up with a hand crank, maybe it wants to be dead,” said Brrr. “Ever think of that?”

The dwarf only groaned. “The Clock isn’t just a font of prophecy. It’s—a kind of conscience, I think.”

“It won’t be the first conscience ever nodded off. I’m joining it. Good night.”

But the Lion’s rest was pestered by the calls of hootch-owls and the slither of pelican beetles under dried pine needles. He was worried that the dwarf seemed immobilized by the Clock’s paralysis. He was worried they shouldn’t be sleeping here, but should be on the road already, getting away. He could hear marksmen in every scrape and shudder of forest.

Always some itch that worrying couldn’t scratch. Brrr slipped sideways in and out of the kind of sleep that masquerades neatly as the actual moment—is he a Lion aware of being almost asleep in a summery pine forest, or is he dreaming of that same reality?

Apparitions of his past detached from the fretwork of chronology and drifted into consciousness, out again. The Lion swam in that underwater wonderland where action and consequence lose their grip on each other.

Look who’s here on conscience’s catwalk: striking poses between wakefulness and dream.

The nobleman who’d thought up for the Lion an agent’s assignment. The man who had smelled of licorice and tobacco. Avaric, Margreave of Tenmeadows. His thin pumpkin-colored mustache and goatee, that bearing few Animals could imitate. Damn the confidence of the titled!

Avaric gave way to Jemmsy, the first human Brrr could remember meeting—a humble soldier of the Wizard of Oz. The Lion’s first friend, so his first betrayal. What made Brrr think he could care for a little girl, even for a while? Doing damage—that was the Lion’s métier.

Jemmsy flew apart into ashes. In the Lion’s hypnogogic paralysis, Jemmsy resembled the swarm of Ozmists, said to be fragments of ghost who haunted the Great Gillikin Forest. What had they asked? “Tell us if the Wizard is still ruling Oz.” And Cubbins, the boy-sheriff of the Northern Bears, had asked them a return question: “Tell us if Ozma is alive.”

Why didn’t hooded phantasms in their sepulchral moan ever ask, “Tell us if salted butter is better than unsalted in a recipe for a Shiz mincemeat pasty?” Prophetic questions and answers only cared about rules—powers, thrones, pushiness.

Cubbins faded away into a pattern of sedges and paisleys. Brrr was nearly asleep, and then a thought of the ancient oracle known as Yackle intruded upon the artsiness of the mind yielding to dream.

She was so robust in his thoughts that he sat bolt upright. That cunning fiend! In his mind she was more demanding than ever. “Take care of the girl,” she’d hectored him not six months ago. “I need you to stand for her, if she needs standing for.” She’d been talking about the child of Liir and Candle. None other than Elphaba’s granddaughter. But was this girl who showed up—Rain—the right one? The Clock seemed leery of her, according to the dwarf. And Brrr couldn’t be sure. He lay down again. Behind his closed eyelids, as the girl stretched and rubbed against his spine and rolled over, he tried to imagine her as green, though in daylight she seemed the same filmy milkweed color of so many Munchkinlanders and Gillikinese.

Clocks are color-blind, thought Brrr. Let the Clock recover its spring and go back to being the conscience of Oz. It can sort out Rain’s reality. I’m too tired.

All his previous disasters danced attendance upon him now, a big lousy finish. That nightly inquisition, as character relievedly dissolves into oblivion: Who are you really? The Lion had a wife with whom he didn’t sleep, not only for the problem of incompatible proportions but because Ilianora was stitched into a finalizing virginity. The Lion had fixated on many humans and Animals alike, and loved only one, Muhlama H’aekeem, an Ivory Tiger. That had gone nowhere in a hurry. Had he sired litters? No. His part in the Matter of Dorothy and the death of the Wicked Witch of the West was puzzling to all, himself included—was he an enemy of the state? Or a hero of the nation? Or just an empty space in the world wearing an acceptably impressive mane—that was how he accounted for himself, up and down and be done with it.

So maybe he wasn’t capable, he concluded, of fulfilling Yackle’s request of him. “Take care of the girl.” Why should he? Elphaba had done him no favors, unless you believed those who said he’d been a Lion cub in Shiz, and she and her friends had rescued him from some unsavory experiment in a lab. No way to prove it, of course.

But here was Rain, in her sleep, rudely scratching herself between her buttocks. The Lion could feel the girl’s spindly arm. His spine and hers, back to back.

But why wasn’t he capable? Come on. Lady Glinda had looked after Rain without drawing attention to the matter. And face it, Lady Glinda was hardly Old Mother Glee from the operettas. If Glinda could manage, couldn’t Brrr? With Ilianora’s help? With or without the dwarf’s help, the Clock’s advice?

But the Clock had gone somnolent, Brrr remembered. A conscience in a coma.

But but but. The endless clockwork spin of self-doubt.

He had come to no conclusion in his roundabout reflections. Sleep rescued him temporarily from the obligation to fret about it any longer.

3.

The new others were still asleep. Rain picked her way around them: the white-haired woman with the hard-soft face, the goldeny Lion, the little mean man. Also the seven acolytes of the Clock, who were tickling one another in their sleep, she thought.

She didn’t miss Glinda. She didn’t miss Puggles. She half expected Miss Murth to be lurking under the pines with a face flannel at the ready, but when Murthy didn’t show up Rain pushed on. She was intent on climbing back up to the lookout to see what could still be seen of the dragons in the water.

Her mind for a path was clever enough. The light rowed like slanted oars along the way, showing her how to go. It felt good to be out in the world. Not dangerous at all, no matter what Miss Murth had kept saying, especially lately.

Ah, the lake. At this hour its surface steamed black-silver. Green glowed on the hills. Green painted the southern coves like a skin of algae. She noticed smoke above Zimmerstorm, though she was too young to wonder if it signified the remains of a town burned in reprisal. She couldn’t see the mansard roofs of Mockbeggar Hall, and she didn’t think to look for them.

The dragons were gone. The ice was gone. The ruins of one ship drifted like a broken island. Two of the ships were yoked and listing. The fourth ship was gone, maybe sunk entirely, or paddled to port somewhere out of sight.

She was sorry for the ships but sorrier for the dragons. She bet no one had asked them if they was interested in swimming boats around. She had helped to ice them in—somehow she knew that. She didn’t know the word ashamed, or even the notion, but she felt punky and wished it hadn’t happened. Lady Glinda was in trouble and there weren’t no other way; but still.

The bits of timber on water looked like broken letters.

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