HAH,” SAID the Lion. “You have to leave the way you come in? So what did you mean by that? You have to go out of the world the way you came into it? Imbecilic and diapered?”
Yackle didn’t speak. He pressed his point. “Did you decipher your own gibberish? You’ve been trying to die as a human, but if you never were born as a human, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Ha-ha.”
She was silent for a long time. Her hands moved as if she were picking up the green glass bottle in her mind, all over again. When she spoke, her voice had an opacity to it.
“So you did have something to give me after all,” she said. “You come in all rough edges and smarmy clothes, and it seems you have something to say.”
He shrugged. He didn’t know what she meant.
“That’s why I’ve been down in the crypt for a year without having the plea sure of a visit from a gentleman caller named Master Death. My first prophecy, and I read it wrong. ‘You have to leave the way you came.’ That was for me. Not for that Cattery Spunge.”
“Don’t look at me,” he said. His paws went up and flat like the palms of a human hand, protesting. Like a Bear cub playing dead. “I’m not certified.”
She was shaken. She left the chairback and meandered to the window. She stood there for a long time. Then, as if trying to change the subject, she said, “Someone’s got a cook fire down there. One of the houses to our west.”
“You can see now? Or are you ‘seeing’ it?”
“I’m smelling it, you blasted bog-wart. The wind is pressing up from the west, and I remember a few stone cottages out that way. If we’re in as much of a skirmish moment as you say, I’d have thought the residents of the small farms that supply the mauntery would be huddling in our great hall for protection. That’s the origin of this establishment in the first place, after all—a keep.”
“Apparently whoever lives out yonder isn’t scared, though.”
“Not scared of war? Hmmm.”
“Or maybe more scared of starvation. It’s harvest season, and the troops have been tromping their bloody jackboots all across the country. Flattening whatever modest crop of autumn wheat the locals can manage to eke out of this unforgiving soil.” He walked to the window and stood next to her. “I’m right. Their house stands amid three small fields of grain ready for harvest. If they leave that harvest too long, the armies will trample the fields for a camp, or bloody it with an encounter.”
“Still, if the farmers become the next casualties of war, they’re not going to be able to enjoy their wheat rolls. So why stay and guard their useless harvest? They should get out of the way while they can.”
“Maybe they’ve had enough of life. Maybe they’ve had their share.”
“Who has had enough of life?” she said.
“You did,” he answered. “You laid yourself down to die.”
“I laid myself down to go,” she corrected him, but then she began to cry. He assumed she didn’t really know what she meant. It must be no fun being an oracle for everyone else and being clueless about yourself.
Before they could return to their chairs to continue, a bell rang in the mauntery. The glass cat slept on. “It is time for prayers before dinner,” said Yackle. “Shall we take a break now?”
“You’re going to pray?” he asked.
“I remember the old ways of this place. I’m going to find a cleaver and trim these pesky nails, for one thing. Then I’m going to sit in a chapel among people who pray,” she replied. “You may have a writ from the Emerald City, but I suspect it doesn’t require me to reveal the metes and bounds of my religious doubt.”
He shrugged again. “Will you join me?” she said, aggressively.
“We have hardly started,” he said. “You’ve told me about meeting the Nanny, and how you came to learn about the Thropps. That’s just scratching the surface. Tell me something more about that Elphaba—the Wicked Witch—before you go. For all I know you’ll be assumed bodily into the Afterlife at the end of prayers tonight.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” she replied and headed for the door.
Then she turned. “The Nanny had come for advice about her employer, about that Melena Thropp—the mother of Elphaba and, eventually, the mother of Nessarose and our current benighted Emperor of Oz, Shell, too. I supplied her with something, some pinlobble leaves cut with milkflower or something. I don’t even remember. Useful, though hardly magical. I never met Melena or her husband the minister. I never met Nessarose or Shell. And that Elphaba—that green girl!—well, we know what happened to her. I was on hand for bits and pieces of that, too.”
“Go on,” he said.
“I’m out of here,” she said, scraping her hand in the air, hunting for the doorknob. “But don’t you see what I’m saying? I had had my first genuine vision, even if it was induced. Something about possibility. All that misty apprehension, those swirls of image trying to form into something intelligible…in all that, I perceived force and hope alike. And I saw that I would be a real oracle, whatever kind of oracle I could manage to be. My calling wasn’t just a joke.”
“Elphaba’s tools of the trade,” he urged her. “The broom. The crystal ball. And wasn’t there a book, some book of magic?”
She wasn’t taking the bait. “The elixir had awakened in me the potential to read for meaning. I would read for meaning. It’s as simple as that. You see, I had been waiting for something to focus my attention. I needed to find something in order to sense a meaning to my life, in this earthly prison of Oz. Maybe I was like the orphan duckling who has to find a friendly dog or a hen or something that might serve as a surrogate mother.”
“Take it from me,” said Brrr, “not everyone who is devoid of a mother seeks out a surrogate.”
“Tell it to the judge,” she replied and left the room.
Like many a blind person, her spatial memory seemed keen. She creaked and tottered away toward the chapel. He listened to the hem of her winding sheet whispering along the floorboards.
It would be fun to hear the scream of some young novice who hadn’t yet heard the news that Yackle had risen from the nearly dead. All he could hear, though, was the arpeggios of melody in the oakhair trees.
NOT MANY MILES to the south, on the banks of the Vinkus River, a stand of young deciduous trees grew fairly close together. A forest fire some eight or ten years earlier had leveled the foliage, so what had sprung up in the ashes was of first growth, and all roughly the same height. Had Brrr possessed a spyglass, and had he thought to train his eyes in that direction, he might have caught a glimpse of a strange and troubled head swimming above the tips of the adolescent trees. It had ears like a dragon, and eyes like a dragon, but its tread was continuous, more like a serpent dragging its huge tail than like a quadruped galumphing along. But Brrr had no such spyglass.