THE ACOLYTES of the Clock of the Time Dragon banged cooking utensils into dirty kettles, tying up their sleeping rolls. Their anxiety at the sound of distant cannon was obvious through their overeager laughter. Boys in the neighborhood of war.
“We’re pulling up stakes here, Missy Morosey,” called the sergeant-at-hand, but when she didn’t arise to hurry to them, he just cursed under his breath and continued knotting ropes to secure the carriage. There was too much to be done to waste his breath trumpeting at her when she decided to go deaf.
Her back was turned to them, her head bent as if listening to an interior argument. She was alone in the way that the terminally ill, crowded into an institution, are alone. Had she a mirror to study her own features, she’d have noted with approval the early silvering of her hair, the spatter of liver spots on the edge of her temple. These would have helped her overlook that her skin still glowed, almost as if backlit, with the enviable sheen of youth.
But she wouldn’t have a mirror. She cared to see in her own face neither shades of the hopeful child she’d been nor glimpses of the schemingly wanton maiden she’d become. In recent years, she had bridled at compliments—“How like a sylph you are! How maidenly!”—as if the efforts to survive her calamities and do useful work had proven incapable of maturing her.
The clearing was striped with oakhair strands. They’d been vibrating earlier, but as night drew near, the winds lapsed, the music stilled. It was almost time for a candle, but she didn’t want to go back to her cohorts at the wagon. Bellow though they might, they wouldn’t leave without her.
She balanced a pen in her hands, musing.
She had been trying for years to write, but even when she managed a line or two, she couldn’t or wouldn’t use the personal pronoun. The habit of alibi prevented her. Anyway, she was no longer convinced that she possessed a character so resolved it could boast about itself: I, I, I! When she did write it, it was followed by a period. I. It might as well be her initial, as in “I. sat alone in the way that the terminally ill, crowded into an institution, sit alone.”
Her reservations weren’t rooted in aesthetics. She knew little about that branch of opinion, and cared less. Beauty and its refinements. Hah! If she had to consider her aversion to the unslakable I in terms of theory, she supposed she would speak about the elegance of justice: Your I and my I are of equal weight. Or about the central paradox of equality: The I, the singular first-person pronoun, had to be eradicated in order to sustain the argument about justice’s brash lack of interest in individual history—even as justice existed to champion the rights of such histories to exist. I and I and I and I, all the land over.
The dwarf barked at her. “Dizzy Lady Lollipalazy! We may have to break camp before our scout returns with news of those pesky troop movements! Skedaddle before we know whether we’re making ourselves targets or skirting the skirmish! Put away your notepaper unless you prefer to be swallowed up in cannon smoke. Though whether it’s the cannon of the EC professionals or the stumpy little guerrillas, we can’t yet tell. Are you listening, Twit-Twit-of-the-Mountaintops?”
After a while she uncorked a bottle of dark red ink and wrote a few words.
The madder the battle, the saner the peace.
She didn’t know if this was true. She wrote to ask herself questions. Was there any reason that peace should ever be sane? Perhaps war was too mad an endeavor for the world to survive intact; perhaps its aftermath was always corrupted. The I. who considered this was not without corruption, she knew.
She thought, but didn’t write: The louder the cannon, the deafer the peacemakers.
This was nearer to what she wanted, but it was not right.
She sighed. Given how the writing impulse had first emerged, no wonder it was so hard to get the correct words.
Some years before signing on as a nurse to a dirty old coot, she had taken up a position as a gentleman’s comfort in the squat industrial Gillikinese town of Red Sand. She learned her trade, mastered it, to useful effect. One evening she maneuvered herself from a shadowy nook in the Hall of Salt Fountains right onto the lap of a northern Gillikinese supplier of iron ore. He gave his name as Serbio, which she knew to be false. No matter; she used alibis in her line of work, too.
After a brief and teasing carriage ride, she ended up in his bed in a lodging house in one of Red Sand’s seedier streets. The smell of hot refuse, brimstone, and tarnish entwined, issued from the drapes; the factories were working overtime.
Her client was drunk and handsome though tending to portliness, and he had a wife at home who wouldn’t let him have his way with a riding crop. While I. could pretend abandon with a finesse verging on the uncanny.
Her client had left her there naked in the brownish lamplight while he answered the lodge keeper’s knock at their door (the interruption seemed to stoke rather than quench his ardor). The lodge keeper complained. Would Master Serbio please see to the inconvenient visitor at the street door as the lodge keeper was retiring—again, and this time for good?
She had expected the interruption—it was why she was here—though she hadn’t figured on the beating. But if she could deliver the goods, the unexpected welts on her naked skin might be seen as badges of honor.
As soon as Serbio left the room and trotted down the hall of the rented chambers, she rose flinching from the bed to accomplish her task.
Her backup team having worked out the scheme properly, she was ready. They’d had word that while Serbio was visiting from the western edge of the Glikkus, a munitions manufacturer in Red Sand was hoping to make a secret negotiation with him. The deal would need to be sealed before Serbio headed home to the slopes of the Scalps, site of the iron-ore mines. She needed to find out: How much blue iron ore was Serbio selling to the arsenal in Red Sand? And how often? Only certain kinds of firearms were prized in infantry maneuvers—the Pollinger redoubler, especially—and the iron ore used in the casting of Pollinger gun barrels was derived primarily from Glikkun sources. So figuring out which factory was producing the bulk of Pollinger artillery, and how frequently, would give a clue as to how the Emerald City generals planned to prosecute an invasion of Munchkinland.
If the bulk of the munitions were being manufactured here in Red Sand, then the invasion would likely start in the south, as (with a carefully planned overland water carry) artillery could be shipped from Red Sand to the Shale Shallows by way of the Gillikin River. The goals of the invasion most likely would be limited to wresting the great lake and its water supply from Munchkinland.
If, on the other hand, the iron ore was being reserved for the new munitions factory in Traum, the EC invasion strategy probably involved cutting across the Glikkus Canals—braving those trolls—and dropping into Munchkinland from the undefended north. A march through the Nest Fallows—a summer holiday for foot soldiers!—then on into Center Munch and Colwen Grounds. Capture the capital first rather than its plum asset, Restwater.
I. had planned the seduction; she had worn the red picandella with the lace reveal; she had done her hair in pearl rosettes. Into the recess scooped out of her abalone-clad toiletry kit she had fitted a slim notebook with curved pages (each cut to fit with a nail scissors) and a pencil shaved to an inch.
The birds in the cage on the landing, though, she hadn’t planned on. At the sound of the knock on the street door at midnight, they had gone mad with song. (They hadn’t uttered a word at the noise of the cudgel or at her bitten-off cries. Perhaps, like so many, they had tendencies of voyeurism.) Now they were shrieking alarums.
On tender and bruised soles she had hurried back to the chamber, praying that all other fly-by-night tenants, even if they’d awakened, would be cowering with their illicit bedmates, hoping to escape notice. Once past the age of twenty, few like a surprise midnight visitor. She had grabbed her skirt and returned with it, its wings wuffling, and she’d flung it over the cage. The birds fell silent at the unexpectedly immediate sunset.
She’d crouched at the top of the stairs, shivering in the cold. She’d listened and heard one, two vital words; and then a bonus, something about an increase in orders next spring. And a second bonus—another supplier was being brought on to help the Pollinger manufacturer—might Serbio consider a reduction in his bulk prices, and meet his competitor’s prices? A lower figure per unit ton…
Her client began to haggle. She had to admire a businessman able to defend his turf while standing in a freezing hall in nothing but button-bottomed pantlettes.
It was enough. Reclaiming her skirt, she stole back to the chamber and made three notes in pencil while the birds began to clamor again.
They covered the noise of Serbio’s tiptoed return. He had wanted to find her cowering with her head under the pillow, her rump exposed; she was busy writing instead.
“A letter to Mama about what a naughty girl you’ve been?” he said, though his arched eyebrow defined his attention as keenly suspicious.
She gasped and managed not to fling the book away from her. She said the first thing that came into her head.
“Notes for a story.” A long pause. “I write fancies; they only come to me when I am in distress.”
She pulled her skirt over her lap, making a game of it, but Serbio grabbed her paper, saying “Whaddya fancy then, so I can provide it times three, heh-heh?”
Blessings on the team member who had insisted she learn code. “This looks like dragon drool,” he said. “Words en’t involved here.”
“I was just starting,” she said.
“Tell me what your big idea is, that you got to get up from your sweet bed of pain to write it down.”
Maybe it was his mention of Mama. Just in time, she remembered a story from her childhood. She had no way of knowing whether it was a famous legend or an invention of her own mother. “It’s about a Witch,” she said, “a Witch who has a sudden yen for a dinner made out of fox babies. But the fox mother howls down the moon, which rolls like a grave door in front of the Witch’s cave. And there the wicked old Witch stays, for ever so long.”
He wasn’t so drunk as not to be dubious; the unexpected business negotiation at midnight had corrected his thinking. “All that in this little sketch, these scratchy lines?”
“I was just beginning,” she said.
“I’ll sit and watch you write,” said Serbio. “You can read it out loud as it occurs to you.” He dropped on his knees by the side of the bed and pulled the skirt away from her lap. He dug his hand. “I don’t know whether we should beat that old Witch out of her cave,” he said, twisting. “What do you think? What do you think we ought to do?”
“Once there was a fox mother,” she said, but where she had avoided weeping earlier, the memory of the story retold in this situation gave a greater grief.
The diversion had worked. She had escaped with the information required, which she supplied to the go-between the next morning over a market stall. “Did you get hurt?” asked the intermediary, pretending to examine potatoes as he slipped the written information into his vest.
“I’m not sure,” she replied, “it wasn’t covered in the story I told.”
For a while after that, she’d survived the worst of the injuries brought on by her espionage by escaping into stories. They served as a kind of supple armor when she was naked, a place to which her mind could retreat. Over and over again she told herself the story of the Witch and the fox babies, like singing a song in her head to give herself bravery—the same thing those filthy noisy birds had done that evening. Later, sometimes both bruised and confused, she collected herself by trying to scribble things down. Not the notes in code—that system, amazingly, had remained undiscovered. But shreds of tales.
She became involved in the work. For a short time it became her salvation. She remembered how her aunts had read the same novel over and over again, for it was the only one they had, and how in their bleak spinsterhoods they had thrilled over false adventures in an invented world.
Then she gained some distance, and lost some momentum. She began to see that her stories were an argument through incident. What had seemed arbitrary, even magical—events unfolding out of her pencil as if it were her pencil doing the thinking—she now deduced as a reductive patterning, a false simplification of the world. Narrative shapeliness was a fiction in and of itself, a lie. The pencil was lying about how much meaning the world was capable of.
Any conclusion she could ever reach was false, because the validity of any conclusion could not be proved by any creature still imprisoned in the throes of life, and therefore still ill educated about myriad cause and final effect.
So after some years, she gave up the experiment of fiction. For a while or for good, she didn’t know. When she was engaged as a helpmeet and a nurse by the elderly widower—the Ogre, she called him—only to be locked in a tower to watch from above as he died, words failed her yet again.
Now sitting just outside of the company of the Clock, her saviors, she watched her pencil trail the paper and, avoiding language, make a long arcing line, a tree trunk of sorts. She added odd hooping branches bent like geometrically accurate arches. A stylized willow, a perfect fountain of green.
Sometimes, when words began to raise welts in her skin and panic in her breast, a drawing would suffice. It came from nowhere, this pure tree on the page. Perhaps it was code of another sort, and she could not yet read it.
The sergeant-at-arms said, “Ilianora!” At the sound of her name, she had to stir; she had no choice. “The runners are back,” he continued, “we’ve worked out our route. We’re right in the crosshairs of the EC militia approaching from the west; we’ve got fifteen minutes to get out of their way. If you don’t come now, we’ll leave you here! And bye-bye, Baby Beauty!”
The dwarf turned to the others. “North we go, boys, north to the edge of the woods but not out into the open, for we don’t know precisely where the Munchkinlanders are, and in the evening light we don’t want them to mistake us as their foe. We don’t want to draw their fire. Haste, or we’ll be collateral cost before midnight! If I haven’t lost my touch, sanctuary should lie just ahead of us.”
The boys to their harness, the dwarf to the seat up front. She tucked her pencil and her notebook into her apron pocket and pulled her veil back over her brow. Then she turned to join her family.
“I’m coming,” she announced, for it was her history to do so, and she could no more avoid her future than she could escape her past. However often she sat quietly apart, fretting over it. “I’m coming,” she called louder, so they could hear her over the sound of cannon.