BRRR TAPPED his pencil. Patience wasn’t his strong suit. Still, he was trying to listen to her with the severity of attention she had paid to him.
WITH A plain demeanor, I could sidle by unnoticed. I had no charm to speak of. The older woman talking to herself in some gutter isn’t an uncommon sight, and passersby rarely bother to interrupt her.
I found it useful staying a bit unwashed. No one wants to look too closely at someone wrapped in strong body odors. That made it easier to sidle along in the background, to watch slit-eyed and sideways at the goings-on of a crowd. To size up a mark. To pick up what I could about this mystery of my existence.
So I stumped about Shiz. I kept my eyes down and my ears open and, for the time being, my big mouth shut.
These were the days before the Wizard arrived—yes, get your pen, I’m going to be as specific as I can, though the patterns of politics always eluded me. But now I know enough to realize that I emerged from my first sleep into the halcyon last days of the line of Ozma. Though halcyon is never so sweet as memory makes it.
Vain Pastorius was squatting upon the throne as the Ozma Regent. He ruled in the Emerald City in the stead of his infant daughter, the Ozma Tippetarius. He was a piece of work. Dim, bullnose-chinned Pastorius. What is this in human time? Fifty, fifty-five years ago? Being born without any childhood to speak of—my “olden days” have a different meaning than yours!—I never could master time. It seems a long while ago, anyway. Pastorius, that old fool. Both sybaritic and syphilitic. Cocooned in silk, drunk on compliments warbled by his ass-licking courtiers. Those were days of expensive balls in the court proper, and of bawdy carnivals of patriotic sentiment outside the palace walls. To distract the urban poor from the deprivations of the Great Drought, about which no one could do a thing.
THOSE DAYS,” she asserted. “You wouldn’t remember. You weren’t whelped yet.”
“Tell me. I’m all ears.” He listened like a doe just noticing a leopard on a limb.
“You want the three historic segments of my earthly life? I’ve lived through a good deal of these modern times, if you can call it living. I’d arrived, preaged and preshrunk, a crone at birth, just at the end of the Ozma regency, before Pastorius was deposed by the Wizard and the infant Ozma was secreted away, probably murdered.
“Then came the Wizardic reign. Nearly four decades of the Great Head, as power consolidated in the Emerald City. Animals were disenfranchised of their rights; and the green shrike of a witch, Elphaba Thropp, flew the skies in agitation. Her sister, Nessarose, presided over the breakaway state of Munchkinland.
“Following the Wizard’s abdication of the Throne, the brief and blameless twin interregnums—first of Lady Glinda, that bottle blonde, and then of the so-called Scarecrow, who came to power and left it again faster than a pile of autumn kindling responds to a winter torch.
“The torch of piety, that is, as wielded by Shell, the Apostle Emperor. Younger brother of Elphaba and Nessarose. He swore he was divinely positioned by the Unnamed God. For all I know he is his, he is his—” She nearly gagged at the thought, and rotated her hand in the air, a forward roll. “He is history.”
Brrr didn’t want to lead her on, to give her anything to work with, if she was indeed an oracle. Let her show facility with those unholy talents. Yet he was curious, too; he couldn’t help saying, “The Emperor Shell is still on the Throne in the Emerald City. No opposition to his royal prerogatives allowed.”
“But of course. Who can gainsay a prince personally chosen by the Unnamed God?”
He nodded: go on.
I HEARD ABOUT current events, naturally. Shiz is a university town from way back, and undergraduates reading history do blather so.
I minded my own business on the pavement—well, begging a little, picking pockets, too, for I saw that was how common folk fed themselves. I figured out that inventing little prophecies—doling out appealing lies—brought in some cash.
I bought my bread and beer from the small change I could earn by pretending to be a seer. I was persuasive enough, a competent liar, and I looked the part, so I developed a clientele. I wore a shawl, like Yackle Snarling. I had fun worrying my hair into a nest of scowls. When I had put a small purse aside I took a room above a tonsorial parlor and I invested in a line of herbal comforts. Limited-liability curses, bogus love charms and the like. I traded only in minor hexes, for I wanted no trouble with the constabulary.
It was fun for a while. I examined tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. I studied the crow’s feet on either side of a spinster’s face and I made up some nonsense about strangers and romance. I never could figure out why romance is so desirable, having felt nothing of the sort myself. Maybe because I was desiccated in that department. With no eggs to hatch, I had no reason to kiss and canoodle, and no appetite for it, either. But those with an experience of canoodling seem reluctant to leave the possibility behind, even when their romantic prospects are limited due to the insults of aging. Onset of severe personal ugliness.
Then I got in a spot of trouble. A local brouhaha, nothing you need worry yourself about. I made a bad investment prediction and a couple of Shiz financiers who were trembling on the edge of ruin fell into it. When their goons came after me with a vengeance, I developed a sudden yen to see the other sights of Oz. So I considered lighting out for the Emerald City, which, while still being built, was already the biggest conurbation in Oz. Finding me there would take some doing, and I hoped they wouldn’t manage it. Still, you have found me. A goon on whose payroll?
BRRR THOUGHT: Is she just making this up because of my own admission of being morally obtuse as a cub? Trying to soften me up by saying, see, we’re equally untethered to conventions of right and wrong?
A court reporter’s first job, though, is to report what is said. Let someone else authenticate it. Someone with more to lose. Hah—as if there were such a creature.
“Very interesting,” he said, and made some notes. Then he regarded them dubiously. He had invented a shorthand all his own to compensate for his inability to hold a pen in the human style—wrong muscle groups for that. But sometimes he couldn’t read his own scrawl. He hoped he wouldn’t come a cropper when it was time to dictate to his transcriber back in the Emerald City court stenographers’ bullpen. She’d slap his face, and her colleagues would snort and titter. The flatheads.
“You haven’t answered my question,” he said. “I had asked about when and how you first came in touch with the Thropp family. When you became aware of them. And I’m trying to find out why your name was scribbled in the notes left in the archives of a clandestine Wizardic operative named Madame Morrible.”
“One has to start somewhere,” she replied. “Because I developed a reputation for clairvoyance in the demimonde of Oz, I attracted the attention of a family retainer of the Thropp contingent. It all goes back to that.”
“Still, can we get to the point? I haven’t been tracking the progress of the military units around here, but if the skirmishes around us heat up, the Emerald City Messiars or the Munchkinlanders may need to fall back to regroup. I wouldn’t be surprised if this House is commandeered for a garrison by nightfall. I plan to be finished up and on my way before that happens. I have no interest in hobnobbing with soldiers. Not my type.”
“Don’t bully me,” she snapped.
He straightened up. This was one of the nicest things that had been said to him since his release from custody. “The Thropp family,” he insisted.
“You next,” she said. “This is a bargain, remember? What happened when you debuted in property society? Civilization and its malcontents?”
The Lion’s voice was testy. “You are under order of the Emerald City Court of Magistrates to comply with my request for information. I don’t have to answer your nosy questions. I’m done auditioning for you. I’ve said all I have to say.”
“You didn’t tell me if you ever found the soldier’s father. As you promised. Do you keep your promises? I’m merely asking.”
“You think you can shame me? You’ll have to work harder than that.”
“Shame you? Hardly. I have no capacity for that,” she said. “No capacity and no interest. I’m not involved in shame. Morals are learned in childhood, and I didn’t have any such holiday called childhood. I’m merely curious.”