Wicked 2 – Son of a Witch

 In time, Liir followed the advice, and learned it was sound. Though eight other gaunt-cheeked boys presented themselves in the same audience, only Liir answered smartly enough to be signed up. He was given a number, a cot, a cabin, a chit for meals, a key, a position title—Second Scrub—and a job, doing just that: potatoes in the commissary kitchen, morning, noon, and evening. The Home Guard ate little but potatoes, it seemed.

 Still, there he was! Here he was! It seemed too good to be true. A smart uniform—someone else’s before it was his, for a few old stains hadn’t entirely washed out, and one sleeve had been replaced with a new one cut from a cheaper weight of broadcloth—but smart just the same. It came with a cap sporting a stiff silly brim in front, and a cocky periwinkle-colored tuft up top. The outfiteer also located a pair of boots, down at the heel and splayed at the toe, but serviceable enough, for they were conveniently overlarge and could take an extra pair of socks in the toe, which kept out the cold.

 Once in a while Liir caught sight of the chatty fellow who had befriended him in the archway, but that soldier was assigned to a different division. In any case, Liir was determined to maintain a comfortable anonymity, so he didn’t go chasing for friends, neither in his own division nor beyond it.

 One morning in the yard, when Liir was hauling sacks of potatoes from a delivery cart, he spotted Commander Cherrystone arriving in a brougham. The man appeared weary. Liir hung back and kept silent, but he invented reasons to linger in the area. He watched as the Commander spoke with a sergeant at arms. The Commander took a cup of coffee in a china cup and reviewed a construction site marked out for a new latrine or barracks or something. He then disappeared into a foreman’s shed with a roll of schemes under his arm.

 An hour or so later he emerged, a cigarette between his gloved fingers. Liir approached Commander Cherrystone and reintroduced himself, a new politeness and reserve hiding what remained of his disapproval. Cherrystone might still be helpful.

 Yes, yes, said the Commander, distracted. Liir wasn’t even sure Cherrystone remembered him, but the commander listened politely and said he would try to find out what he could about the details of carcass removal at Southstairs. You mustn’t hold your breath though, he said. I’ve a lot on my plate. There is much to be done for the defense of our city.

 There is? But we’re not at war? I thought peace was at hand.

 Your highborn champion, Lady Glinda, thinks all is peaches and cream. She’d like it to be. But given the uncertainty of the political situation, the economy needs stimulus, and the threat of war is a great incentive to spend. Fiscal frottage.

 Liir didn’t know what this meant. But things did seem to be happening. For weeks, and then for months, he fed potatoes to the burly soldiers who dug and hauled the earth away from the building site, and eventually began the even harder work of setting colossal foundation stones in place. Liir was glad he was a slender thing, for he was better suited to kitchen work than transporting boulders. But slowly he deduced that, despite his nothing childhood in the nowhere mountains, he wasn’t quite as obtuse as he’d imagined.

 He had no reason for smugness about it, to be sure. He was a bumpkin when it came to national affairs. He’d had little schooling and less practice at rhetoric. He didn’t venture an opinion about current affairs, for he hardly knew what they were. No one bothered to circulate news broadsides in the barracks, and the banter at mealtime boasted about whores and sores. Period.

 What Liir discovered, rather, was that merely by hanging around in the company of Elphaba he had picked up—something. Not power, not intuition, which she seemed to have down to her very eyelash. Not understanding. But something else—a good ear, anyway. Would he could find a way to perform a spell! That was the ultimate competence with language, a skill Elphaba had had in spades, and that she used rarely and reluctantly. What is a spell after all but a way of coaxing syllables together so persuasively that some new word is spelled…some imprecision clarified, some name Named…and some change managed.

 Despite his flight on the broom, Liir was sure he had no instinct for magic. It was the broom that had managed that feat: he’d gone for the ride, nothing more. If he’d ever felt the slightest tremor of intuition or capacity, he’d have pounced on it like a cat on a rat. No, he was duller than the other kitchen lads even about basic things. He couldn’t even predict when he was going to need to use the latrine.

 But he found himself rounding syllables like stones in his mouth, silently. He knew he was shy, and thought to be stupid; he was beginning to suspect, though, that he wasn’t stupid. Perhaps not even slow. Merely uneducated. But not, he hoped, uneducable.

 

 COMMANDERCHERRYSTONE DIDN’T COMEseeking out Liir to answer his question about Nor. When several more weeks had passed and there was no sign of the Commander again, and no message passed on by his aide-de-camp, Liir began to press the issue to others in the Home Guard. Cautiously he started to circulate a scrap of gossip he had invented. A pair of Horned Hogs was slain in Southstairs—because the Hogs were magic. Their carcasses were removed before they could contaminate the other inmates with sorceric powers. Could it be? The kitchen boys, hungry for tales of enchantment, took up the story as if it were gospel. Liir hoped his invention would trip a rebuttal, turning up some useful information about the actual disposition of the Hogs—and by extension, suggest Nor’s next whereabouts. But revelation was slow in coming.

 The winter crashed in with icy spite. His hands turned red and chilblained from the water into which the potatoes dropped. At least he wasn’t freezing or starving to death outside; snow was felling dozens. He bade his time. He was glad he got to feed the fellows who worked at the construction. They had finished shunting boulders onto the site, but even in this cold they were required to lift and set, plumb and point. They got little relief from the cold.

 The Home Guard guessed they were building yet larger barracks, as if the numbers of the force might swell sometime soon. Or perhaps warehouses for the defensive artillery supposedly under development. During a thaw, a steep roof was framed and shingled; when the snows returned, the interior was roughed in at a rapid rate. Before long a unionist cleric, his ceremonial garments hidden beneath heavy fur robes, appeared on its steps. With smoking urns and hallowed gestures he signaled the Unnamed God, and the unfinished place was consecrated as a basilica.

 The basilica was more or less functional by Lurlinemas. True, the pagan cult of Lurline, the sprite said by some to have founded Oz, was out of favor; few but illiterate country folk paid obeisance to Lurline anymore. But the celebration of that old holiday was still popular. Lurlinism had been quietly absorbed into the common culture, not least because the cash tills splashed with money during the festive season.

 Lurlinemas made a welcome distraction from the anxiety about leadership that seemed still to grip Oz, even though the Wizard was now gone half a year. Holiday presents came in on all sides for everyone but Liir. He had prepared a story about his parents’ fierce devotion to unionism and their rejection of the heathen custom, but he didn’t need to lie: no one asked him about the absence of gifts by his bunk. His mates received parcels in gilt paper, silly trinkets, useful clothes, small wallets of cash scented with cloves. He remembered the time Nor had given him the tail of her gingerbread mouse, and his mouth watered, but he swallowed it down.

 The basilica was large enough to hold nearly a thousand at a time, so everyone got to attend the strictly unionist service on Lurlinemas. Liir saw Commander Cherrystone in the front.

 A visiting chaplain with an ungainly flapping lip pulled himself into the pulpit and intoned the beginning of a homily. The sung petition petered out into a tirade against the loose morals of the day. Most of the soldiers went instantly to sleep, propping one another up on the benches, but Liir still had had so little exposure to homiletics that he sat straight up and listened. The preacher, perhaps sensing that someone midway down the room on the left was actually paying attention, began to improve.

 The minister gripped the edges of the lectern and swayed sideways. At every stage, even in the decorous and seemly home that the army provides you here, weird rumors of magical uprisings spring up! Like weevils in the wheat, like maggots in the rump roast! Either his raised voice or the mention of magic stirred the morning crowd awake.

 In order to challenge the blasphemous apocrypha, the minister repeated some stories being told and retold about town. Magic’s appeal is sheer pfaithism: the pleasure faith that attracts by the glitter of its surface, he railed. Change a fish into a farthingale? Or a feather duster? All distraction! All sleight of skin! But change a fish into a fish fillet and feed your hungry mother: now, that’s a magic we can applaud: the magic of human charity!

 Liirwas ready to applaud. Who wouldn’t? But no one else stirred, so he settled his hands back in his lap.

 Urban legends; they spring up when times are grim, continued the homilist. That Ozma will return to govern the humble! That little toast roundlets spread with herbed goat cheese will fall in the desert and feed the starving! That Horned Hogs, in sacrificing themselves, will confer a magical immunity to residents of Southstairs and help them to survive their confinement!!

 Liir nearly jumped out of his seat.

 No, no, continued the minister. The Ozma kidnapped years ago is dead in an unmarked grave, and her bones are halfway to dust. Toast roundlets don’t fall in the desert unless you’re in the final delirium of starvation, and they don’t taste of much even then. Horned Hogs, when they die in Southstairs, are carted to Paupers’ Field, and their corpses burned. Nothing of them remains, not a jot of magical comfort for any of the denizens of Southstairs. Better that prisoners should turn their wretched hearts to the Unnamed God, and beg forgiveness for even imagining such a farrago of faith!

 Paupers’ Field, then. Liir committed it to memory. But he listened to the minister’s address to the end, in case there was more to learn. The words rolled on, sonorously and as buoying, in their way, as the winds had been, the one night that Liir had ventured on the broomstick.

 At the close of the service, Liir bravely pushed forward and touched the minister on the sleeve. The man—older than he’d appeared from below—turned wearily to look at Liir.

 They exchanged a few words. Liir asked for instruction in unionism. He’d been moved by the remarks. He wondered aloud if escaping Kiamo Ko the way he did, even at the cost of Elphaba’s death, had been the Unnamed God’s way of getting Liir’s attention. But the minister said, a bit too sharply, Why? Have you seen or do you know of magic being done? Here? On the premises perhaps? Are you being tempted by the wrong forces? Explain, boy! Liir was alarmed and shrank back. Foolish to have identified himself so! Shaking his head, he excused himself from the conversation and left.

 It was too cold to venture out of the Guard yard. But the weeks would pass, the sun would wheel. When the worst of the season had slunk by, he would think up an excuse to skulk out to Paupers’ Field. Learn what he could.

 

 THE DAY DID COME,though not soon enough, and Liir made the trip swiftly, and only a little illegally. (Initially he had invented an ailing mother and a crippled father, and after he’d been in the Home Guard six months, he was given leave to carry them a few coins and a loaf of bread.) Apparently, though, his invention of the story of magic Horned Hogs had worked too well. The legend had spread through the urban population like news of a scandal, and pilgrims had begun to mass at the pyre of the Horned Hogs. The crematorium at Paupers’ Field had had to be abandoned and demolished. The squatters whose tents had sprung up on the dreadful spot knew little of what had recently gone on there, and nothing of Horned Hogs, or if an escaped convict from Southstairs had been discovered.

 Still, returning to base, Liir found himself less than distraught. If Nor had really had the invention and courage, even after those years, to secret herself out of Southstairs sandwiched between two slaughtered Hogs, she’d have managed somehow to find a warm place for the winter. Their reunion was ahead somewhere, waiting for them.

 He would have faith in the Unnamed God, who even now was probably ordaining the right time and place in some secret holy plan. All Liir had to do was bide his time, do his work, peel his potatoes, keep his nose clean and his eyes open, and the UG, as Liir’s barracks mates termed it, would tell him what to do next, and when to do it.

 As to his hopes for helping Princess Nastoya—it wasn’t going to happen. You didn’t learn magic in the army. He had nothing to say to her, no way to give comfort. Probably she was dead already, anyway.

 

 THERE WERE NEW HABITSto examine in the privacy of his bunk. Self amusement was the least of it: operating solo beneath the rough sheets was risky business in a dormitory setting, and his mates were always alert to the cues that one of their number was finding himself hot and bothered, and doing something about it.

 No, his secret distractions were acts of memory, flights of doubt, even at times a feeble attempt at prayer. (He wondered why the chaplain spent so much time discoursing on the value of prayer to the enlisted man, yet never gave instruction in how prayer ought to be conducted.)

 Deep in the funk given off by a dozen young men dozing in nearby bunks, Liir itemized his attributes, and considered how they were being heightened and strengthened by life in the barracks.

 Rectitude, for one. Propriety. Custody of the senses!—that was how he (mostly) resisted masturbation.

 Also, Liir found he was developing a capacity for respect. The mark of a soldier, of course. Back at Kiamo Ko, he hadn’t been respectful—he’d been ignorant and scared. There was a difference.

 The army thrived on itsregulae . Precision, obedience, and rightness of thinking. Had Elphaba possessed any of those virtues? When she’d been sloppy with emotion, vivid with rage or grief—which was most of the time—she hadn’t kept to a schedule. Coffee at midnight, waking up the others by slamming the larder door looking for cream! Lunch at sunset, bread crumbs on the harpsiclavier keys. Pelting through the gates of the castle, in any weather, at any hour, no matter if Liir had just laid out a couple of coddled eggs for her. Studying the night through, getting excited, reading things from that—thatbook of hers—out loud, to hear how they went, to hear how they sounded. Waking Chistery on his perch at the top of the wardrobe. Impetuous and selfish, totally selfish. How had he not seen it?

 She was obedient—yes—to herself. Though what good had that done her—or anyone else? So far as he could remember—and he spent some wakeful nights examining his recollections carefully—she had rarely asked anything of Liir except that he keep himself safe.

 And certainly she’d never asked him to be obedient. How was one to learn obedience unless one was thwacked into line? He’d been left alone, to roam the dusty corridors with Nor and her brothers. He’d picked up reading almost by accident. He’d been clothed by Sarima’s sisters, that clot of spinsters who had nothing better to do but brood and bitch. Now,there was a group of responsible adults, he thought, though he found he couldn’t actually remember their faces.

 Still, he reminded himself, stiffly, to be kind. What did Elphaba know of child rearing? When he listened to his companions gossiping about their mothers—those cozy, pincushiony mamas, who never cuffed a child without a follow-up cuddle—he knew that nothing about Elphaba smacked of the maternal. Maybe this was all the proof he needed that she wasn’t his mother, couldn’t have been. She had had lots of power, in her own way, but she had no more motherly instinct than a berserk rhino.

 Even a berserk rhino can bear a child, his deeper voice reminded him, till he told it to shut up.

 

 MONTH AFTER MONTH,his days were spent in drilling. In learning to shoot. How to run holding a rifle without tripping on it and spearing himself. How to march in formation. (He didn’t learn horsemanship, as the only soldiers permitted to ride were those who had brought their own mounts with them when they enlisted.)

 How to wear his hair saucily, to thrill the maidens on the pavement.

 How and when to salute, though not, precisely, why.

 How to peel potatoes faster.

 What was curiously obscure, Liir thought, was the nature of the menace that the Home Guard was formed to protect against. The commanding officers didn’t reveal much about possible threats. When at ease in their dormitories or in the canteen, the enlisted men discussed the question.

 Some felt the Home Guard existed to provide mortal comfort to the citizens of the Emerald City. Should the rabble ever rise up, should the denizens of Southstairs break free—hell, should a mighty comet thud into the Palace and burn it to blazes—the Home Guard would be right there, ready to restore order.

 Others argued that the Home Guard wasn’t a municipal police force but a defensive army. Before the Wizard’s departure from the Palace, the province of Munchkinland had declared its autonomy as a Free State. Since the Emerald City’s main water supply, Restwater, fell wholly within Munchkinland’s borders—to say nothing of the great arable reaches that fed the capital of Oz—hostilities were conducted primarily on the diplomatic level. It was inconceivable that the EC would retaliate against the upstart government in Center Munch; a full-scale civil war in Oz would imperil both the water and food supplies of the capital.

 But what if Munchkinland raised an army? If such an army invaded the Emerald City, the Home Guard had to be ready to toss them out on their asses. So the drills were constant, the defenses shored up, and it was said that spies were kept busy trying to find out just what Munchkinlanders were up to.

 Spies, said Liir. It sounded lovely and sexy and dangerous.

 Still, he supposed that it was good policy for the enlisted men not to know the precise reasons for their constant drilling. The information belonged to those wise enough to interpret it, and Liir knew this didn’t include him.

 

 HE LEARNED A LITTLE MOREwhen he and five others were singled out of a lineup one morning and told to wash and clothe themselves in their dress uniforms. Palace detail, said the commanding officer.

 Palace detail! How smart! Hewas moving up. Nose to the grindstone, eyes on the prize: it worked.

 When Liir and his mates reported for duty, he realized why he’d been chosen. The detail involved six trim young men of identical height and build: two blond heads, two chestnut, two charcoal. Liir was one of the charcoals.

 They were to accompany Lady Glinda and Lord Chuffrey into the House of Protocol, said the commander. There, the well-placed couple was being inducted in the ceremonial Order of the Right. The Lady Glinda was being thanked for her period of service to the country, and her husband for his own contributions. It was a high honor for the soldiers of the Home Guard to attend this ancient privilege of the just getting their just deserts, said the commander. So smarten up, top form, eyes front, chin high, buttocks in, shoulders back. The usual.

 With his riding crop he smacked one of the blond heads. You think this is the stables, you dolt? Get rid of that chewy pulp or I’ll knock your teeth out your behind.

 It is something to be charcoal-haired, anyway, thought Liir. Isn’t it?

 He’d see Lady Glinda again. That much was for sure. If he had no further campaign with her, at least he had a little history. And who knew? As the throne minister of Oz, perhaps she followed all things; maybe she’d remembered his quest for Nor, and had information for him that Cherrystone had never heard.

 At the Palace, Commander Cherrystone caught his eye and winked. Liir and his five mates made a sort of human wallpaper, dazzling in their white sartorials and whitened boots, gold plumes splashing from their half-helmets, standing at the head of the aisle.

 Lady Glinda walked a step or two ahead of her husband, greeting the cheering crowds with a rolling movement of her scepter. Her skin was firm and her chin up, and her eyes dazzled as they had done the first time Liir had seen her. She wore antique mettanite struts, and a tiara of cobalts and diamonds, and she advanced in her own warm front of orange blossom fog. Her face was trained on the crowd, giving them love, and when her eyes passed over Liir and he gulped and willed her to recognize him, she didn’t.

 Commander Cherrystone followed, pushing Lord Chuffrey in a wheeled chair. The nobleman’s head was fastened peculiarly on his neck, as if it had come unfastened and been reattached by someone inadequate to the task. Chuffrey drooled on his epaulets. Attending like a nursemaid with impeccable references, Commander Cherrystone discreetly wiped away the spittle.

 The ceremony was abbreviated due to Lord Chuffrey’s obvious ill health. Perhaps he was dying and they were rushing through this convention as a thanks for all the good he and his bride had done the government. Which in Lord Chuffrey’s case, if Liir understood the testimonial talks correctly, seemed to be a canny invention in the field of fiscal accounting that had helped the government avoid bankruptcy some years back. In Lady Glinda’s case, it was her dazzling throne minister-ship, over all too soon, but the rewards to be reaped for years to come, and so on, and so on.

 Glinda seemed to have learned how to control her blushing in public, or perhaps she just wasn’t listening to the speeches.

 Toward the end, when Liir’s green eyes had begun to glaze over a bit, a rustle and hush in the peplums and fozzicles of the gentry caused Liir to turn ever so slightly to a side door. Supported on both sides by a pretty maiden, in came the Scarecrow himself. He looked greatly inebriated, or troubled by muscular atrophy; his limbs were akimbo and his eyes rolled like hard-boiled eggs on the spin.

 At first Liir thought it was a joke, like a Fool at a sacred pageant. But the cornets trilled, and the great and good deigned to applaud. The Scarecrow gave a genuflection of such profound clumsiness that several of the Home Guard snorted. The Scarecrow said nothing, just waved, and Lady Glinda curtseyed, a cataract of tulle bunching in front and frothing around to the back.

 The Scarecrow retreated. Liir felt cold and mean. The Scarecrow had been an obvious imposter—nothing like the Scarecrow Liir himself had walked with along the roads from Kiamo Ko. Couldn’t they see it? Or were they complicit? Or maybe, in their eyes, one Scarecrowdid look like every other Scarecrow.

 The whereabouts of the real Scarecrow hardly bore imagining, now that Liir had seen the depths of Southstairs. Or perhaps, just perhaps, cannier than he’d ever let on, the real Scarecrow had managed to disappear himself somewhere. Good luck to him, in prison or in hiding.

 Liir didn’t pay attention to current affairs, generally, or not those beyond the intrigues within the barracks; he thought it beneath him to follow the details of how the civilian world amused itself. Was Lady Glinda stepping down willingly or had she been crowded out by some coalition of antagonists? The question occurred to him, but in dismissing it as meaningless, finally, Liir felt the first flush of adult apathy. It was welcome. About time.

 At any rate, to be invisible to Lady Glinda and unrecognized by the next hollow head of Oz—it brought back to Liir the truth of his isolation. He wouldn’t approach Glinda for news of Nor; he wouldn’t stand the insult of having to reintroduce himself.

 At length, the soldiers were shown a side room where they could nibble at dry crackers while Lord Chuffrey and Lady Glinda were received at a luncheon. To avoid possible stains on their dress sartorials, the soldiers were forbidden to drink anything but water. Liir was pissed at serving as a pretty accessory for Lady Glinda. He refused even the water.

 When they saw the couple back to its carriage, Liir didn’t even bother to let his eyes sweep over them. Should her eyes pick him out, now that the job was done, let her address him. But she didn’t.

 

 AYEAR PASSED, another. Nothing was the same, year by year, but little was different, either.

 He found himself watching how the men consorted together, realizing long after it had begun that this was effectively his first experience of male behavior. Kiamo Ko had been unrelievedly female, at least in the adult generation; the shadowy presence of Fiyero, long lost husband and lover and father, was real but indistinct. Liir had learned nothing of how men speak, or joke, or trust, or fail to trust one another.

 In the service, there were games, and Liir played hard and well. Formal clubs and socials, and he attended—stiffly. His work assignments gave order to his days and brought some satisfaction. He became known as a good listener, though this was mostly because he was unwilling to spill the beans about his quirky upbringing, and listening was easier than chatting.

 Liir grew accustomed to his privacy. When furloughs were granted, he chose not to take advantage of them. Once he was invited to join a fellow cadet on a trip home to the family farm somewhere north of Shiz, in Gillikin. Liir had been tempted to accept. But the night before they were to leave, the cadet had a few too many. He began to carol about his doddery old daddums and the good little woman who’d married him and on and on and so forth.

 They’re so proud of me. It’s the best thing anyone in the family has ever done—to be selected a member of the Home Guard!

 Peculiarly undistinguished lot, Liir supposed.

 Oh, said the cadet, but his mother’s apple trickle could bring tears to the eye! Indeed, it brought tears to his, but Liir’s eyes were stones. The next morning he told the headachy cad to go on without him; he’d changed his mind.

 You don’t know what you’re missing, said the cadet.

 I’d like to keep it that way.

 The fellow returned with a sizable chunk of apple trickle wrapped in a checked cloth, and it was good. Too good, in a way; Liir had never tasted anything so wonderful. He resented every tasty crumb.

 A few weeks later, when a commander’s rifle had gone missing from the rack, Liir made an appointment to see the commander privately. He said he knew that the code of honor required him to speak. Deftly Liir laid suspicion on the shoulders of the Gillikinese cadet. The lad was hauled off into solitary for a few days. When he had not confessed in a week, he was stripped of his uniform and excused from service, dishonorably.

 He never made it home, someone said later; he killed himself on the way. Hung himself in someone’s back field, strung up on a black-trunk elm.

 Nonsense, thought Liir; that’s just army gossip. Who would bother to learn such specific details of a suicide of someone so patently soft and regrettable?

 He sat in chapel. Nothing convinces like conviction, thundered the minister, warning against softness, which when you came to think about it seemed like the UG’s way of approving of Liir’s maneuver. His own lack of remorse about it seemed authoritative in and of itself. When the rifle was found elsewhere, merely misplaced in the wrong locker, the entire company simply avoided the subject. No one came after Liir to ask him to justify his previous statements. It seemed no one wanted to be caught in the wrong.

 A capacity for interiority in the growing adult is threatened by the temptation to squander that capacity ruthlessly, to revel in hollowness. The syndrome especially plagues anyone who lives behind a mask. An Elephant in her disguise as a human princess, a Scarecrow with painted features, a glittering tiara under which to glow and glide in anonymous glamour. A witch’s hat, a Wizard’s showbiz display, a cleric’s stole, a scholar’s gown, a soldier’s dress sartorials. A hundred ways to duck the question: how will I live with myself now that I know what I know?

 The next time Lurlinemas rolled around, Liir volunteered for solitary guard duty in the watchtower that capped the great chapel. He wouldn’t agree to being spelled so he could spend an hour at the holiday dinner. I determine my own duty and I perform it, he said to the cadet assigned to replace him. The cadet was only too happy to sidle back to the festivities. Liir took pleasure in dumping out, untasted, the tankard of ale snuck in to thank him.

 

 ANOTHER YEAR,or was it two? At length the day came when Liir’s company learned it was shipping out. But to where?

 You don’t need to know, said the sergeant from Detail Desk, looking over his notes. Your mail will be forwarded.

 Is this a…military moment? asked someone, trying to speak stoutly.

 You get a night on the town before you go, six chits each. A court-martial for you and a fine for your family if you don’t come back by the morning call of the roll, they were told.

 Liir had no family to be fined, and no one to shame with a court-martial, but he was beginning to have enough of a sense of propriety not to want to be ashamed of himself. And since the months had become years, and the Home Guard was an institution that honored tradition and resisted innovation, he had lost sight of how much he had grown up. He was old enough to have a couple of beers, goddamn it. Because who the hell knew what was coming next?

 He had to borrow civilian clothes from mates—a pair of leggings, a tunic, a waistcoat—for he’d long outgrown the rags he’d arrived in. He’d outgrown everything but the old cape, in which he had no intention of swanning about, not in front of his mates, nor anyone else.

 He kept the broom and cape in a locker, away from prying eyes. He no longer put his face in the musky pleats of the cape’s broadcloth, to harvest piercing memories. He didn’t want to think of the past. Memories of Nor were pressed flat as envelopes, juiceless, between the folds of the cape, interleaved with memories of Dorothy, Chistery, Nanny—and oldest, Elphaba. They were of no use to him now. Indeed, they were a hindrance. Neither did he dream of his old associates—he could scarcely call them family, or friends—nor of anyone else.

 The fellows who made it a habit of jolly-follying knew where to head for a good time. A tavern, they said, in Scrumpet Square: known for cheese-and-bacon temptos and even cheesier women. The floor was sawdusted, the beer was watered, the elf who served the drinks was neutered, and the tone agreeably disreputable. The place proved to be as advertised, and packed to the rafters, as the news of a Mission had spread. Common knowledge held that departing soldiers were good at loosening their wallets, their trousers, and sometimes their tongues, so an assortment of bamboozlers, shady ladies, and spies were fighting the buckos for the attention of the barkeep.

 After so long in something like solitary confinement—solitary because hewas solitary now, by choice and by nature—Liir found the exercise unsettling but not appalling. He tried to relax. He prayed to the UG that the spirit of relaxation should break the yoke of tension that rode across his shoulders here and now and, come to think of it, always.

 Everyone wanted to know where they were going, and why. In all the theories that were shouted from table to table, one of them had to be right, but which one? An uprising among what remained of the Quadlings down there in Qhoyre? No—a final decision, and about time too, to invade Munchkinland and reannex it? No, no, nothing so exciting—only a boring public works project, building a dam across one of the vales of the Scalps, to create a reservoir deep enough to supply the Emerald City and decrease its dependence on foreign water. Or yet again no: no: no: no: something more wonderful than that. The cave of Ozma has been discovered, and she is to come back and rule our Oz, and the idiotic Scarecrow can go stuff himself. Hah! Good one: a Scarecrow stuffing himself.

 Liir hunched into his borrowed jacket and tried to look as if he was expecting someone. His mates weren’t avoiding him, exactly; they knew they’d be stuck with him for some time to come. They were spilling over with chat and banter on all sides, from all comers. Liir watched pockets being picked, groins being stroked, apron strings unraveling, beer spilling, candles guttering, mice cowering in the shadows, and the elf scampering almost weightlessly about with trays of beer glasses.

 When he came to whisk away Liir’s glass for a refill, he said, Three Ozpence, guv; and how’ve you been keeping since Southstairs?

 Liir’s head whipped. When Glinda hadn’t recognized him for anything but his function, he had hated her for it. Now he hadn’t recognized this elf—and he’d only ever seen one before! Or was that a good enough excuse?

 He found the name on his tongue. Jibbidee?

 The same. Can’t stay to chew the fat. Money’s sloshing in the till.

 How’d you get out? I thought no one got out—

 No one? Hah. You did, didn’t you? You weren’t meant to, I think. And so did that girl you were looking for, if the stories they told were true. Folks gets out, boy-britches. Many different ways. Sneaks out, flies out, folks their way out. Myself, it was bribery. Once upon a time I recognized a ring too unique to have found its way to the Under-mayor legally. Chyde would’ve slaughtered me, but elves are hard to pin down. He leaped up in the air like a figure filled with helium; it was true. Elves had little weight. It’s what made them so easy to kill, if you could catch them. So now I’m Upside, enslaved here to the shackles of righteous employment, too tired to think straight, and Chyde is free as a bee down Southstairs, out of mortal company, light, and beauty. Which of us wins the liberty sweepstakes?

 He skirled away without waiting for an answer, but when he came back to drop the next beer on the table, he added, You’re not one I’d have spotted for the military, you.

 Hidden depths.

 Hidden shallows, I think. But Jibbidee wasn’t being mean. He grinned. Elves were like house cats that knew how to smile; the effect was unnerving. That beer’s on me.

 I inshist—

 Don’t bother. You’ve got the welfare of the land on your shoulders. All I have to do is keep awake till last call, and then mop up the vomit. He twitched his ears—which looked in considerably better shape than they once had. I heard about how the girl you were hunting for was said to have escaped, but not how you did. They’re still talking about it down there. Confounded ‘em all.

 Liir scowled; he didn’t like to remember flying. The experience had been grand, and a sense of airsickness had obtained only after the fact.

 Did you ever find the girl?

 I found out how to mind my own business.

 The elf didn’t take the offense Liir had intended him to. Cheerily enough, he riposted, You’re the rare one, then, who knows so well the line between your business and anyone else’s. He bounded off.

 Liir drank up and felt the beer rise in him—an agreeable and uncustomary heaviness. He imagined he could sit there all night, shoulders hunched, watching the circus of human life at a high pitch. After a half an hour, though, he had to go piss it out.

 On his way back to the table he lurched against a soldier, who turned at the thump. Liir recognized him. It was the guy who had told him how to apply to the Home Guard all that time ago—the fellow on the gooseball pitch who’d sheltered with him during a hailstorm. Imagining Liir had approached him intentionally, the soldier said, Oh, it’s you.

 Well, it is, said Liir. All these years, and never thanked you for the skinny on how to get in.

 If you’re looking for advice on how to get out, I’m afraid it’s too late now, said the fellow. He was sleek and rangy both, with hair the color of clarified butter, swept long across the brow and clipped at the nape. Even in this welter and swelter he was wearing officer’s code stripes on the shoulders of his smart civilian tightcoat. A Minor Menacier, by the look of it.

 Liir, said Liir.

 Some do. They can’t help themselves, said the petty officer. Leer, he explained. How much have you had to drink?

 Not too much enough of.

 You ought to sit down. You don’t want to throw up on my threads.

 The Menacier commandeered a small table from a couple of floozies. Trism, he said, by way of introduction. Trism bon Cavalish.

 Liir. He never said Liir Thropp, though that was his closest approximation to a real name. Formally he’d enrolled as Liir Ko—taking the second part of Kiamo Ko as his surname. Now, though, he didn’t offer even that. The Minor Menacier seemed not to notice, however.

 Do you know where’s we’re going?

 I’m staying put. But if I knew where you were going and I told you, that’d be treason. He took a long pull on his beer. No, I don’t know.

 They studied the crowd in a complacent silence as if they’d been friends for years. Liir didn’t want to ask questions of Trism’s origins, lest Trism ask him the same. So he asked Trism what a Minor Menacier’s duties consisted of. Maybe he’d one day get to be one. Day. A Minor Menacier. Someday. Pluck a duck, the beer was telling.

 Development of Defense, said Trism. That I can tell you.

 Which means what? New sword technique?

 No, no. I’m in husbandry.

 Liir didn’t know what to say to that; he wasn’t sure what husbandry was.

 Animal husbandry, Trism explained, though in the noise of the bar, Liir couldn’t tell if he said Animal or animal, the sentient or the nonsentient creature. Training for military uses, said Trism at last. Are you slow, or are you falling in love with me?

 It’s the beer, said Jibbidee, swooping down again. I’m not sure I’d fill him up with any more, begging your pardon, unless you want to husband him home.

 Sorry; it is the beer, said Liir, suddenly queasy. I think I need some air.

 Can you manage on your own? By the tone of Trism’s voice he certainly hoped so but courteously he helped Liir up and loaned a strong arm. Make way, make way; hail hail, the prince of ale, he cried. Liir felt like that old weevily Scarecrow he’d seen at the Palace. His legs had contradictory intentions.

 More or less tumbling out a side door, they were almost plowed into by a carriage careering down the alley from Scrumpet Square. It pulled up to let out more custom. Whoa, your country needs you, don’t go slipping under the wheels of this fancy rig, said Trism, hauling Liir back and holding him up.

 The door flew open and a man in a fashionable dark brocaded vest jacket descended. All my small life that stays small and separate comes out now’s time to see me drunkish, said Liir, not fair play, that. The smart figure was Shell.

 Oh ho, said Shell, in a merry mood. I knew you’d turn up one day! So, laddio, you’re doing the town? Out soliciting officers, by the look of it? That’s my boy.

 I’m a Guardsman, said Liir, straightening up more or less successfully. Ow.

 Watch your head. You may need it one day. I wondered where you’d gone! Wicked old Chyde was absolutely flummoxed. He’d no idea what happened to you. Assumed you’d slipped and drowned in one of the canals, but then suicides and other such big shit usually silts up against the grates at one end of the line or the other, and you never did. Somebody said you’d melted, and sifted right through the sieve! Ha! That was a good one.

 I was looking for Nor, said Liir, trying to hang on to any small knot of reality he could pinch.

 Sure, and I remember that well. She’d snaked her way out somehow, hadn’t she? And then word of her turned up, now where was it—?

 I shall leave you to your reunion, said Trism, starting to detach himself.

 Oh, I wouldn’t dream of parting chums, said Shell. We’re only young once, lads; make the most of it. And tomorrow you go toodle-oo, I hear. No, I can’t stay and chatter; I’ve work to achieve in the next hour, now that lips are oiled enough to speak what I want to hear. But I’m talking strategy to the armed forces: I’ll save my breath for kissing, or kissing up. Off you go, boys. If you want to borrow my trap and get home in a hurry, just see it’s sent right back. I was young once, I remember. Go ahead.

 Sir! snapped Trism. I am an officer of the Home Guard!

 And I’m the wicked snitch of the west, said Shell. Oh well, I was trying to be useful. Not my strong suit. Driver, an hour, and don’t have too much yourself; I don’t want to end up in hospital. I’m to be back at the Palace by midnight for fun and frolic if I can pay with the coin they require.

 Nor! said Liir. Saying the very word, after all this time, had made him come round. Where is she?

 Am I your personal secretary? I don’t know. Was it Colwen Grounds in Munchkinland?

 Couldn’t have been; that’s a hostile state, intervened Trism, bulking up.

 You’rein a hostile state, by the look of it. Don’t sneer at me, Minor Menacier. I get around; that’s my job. But no, it wasn’t there. Maybe it was Shiz. Was it Shiz? I can’t remember exactly where. Don’t pester me, Liir: I can see you’re going to pester me. I have to go.

 Shell! said Liir, but the man was gone in a snap of cloak and a slam of the door.

 Well, said Trism. I’m not seeing you home, if that’s what you’re thinking.

 I am thinking no such thing. Though that coach would have been useful right now.

 I wouldn’t take the loan of a boot from the likes of him. Bounder. I’ll hail a cab or a street chair for you.

 They walked to the front of the pub. Scrumpet Square was bright with torchlight. While Trism hailed a driver, and the cab was being brought round, Liir trained his eyes on some scraps of graffiti written with drippy paint on a public wall. He tried to bring them into focus as a way to sober up. In four different hands, applied at four different opportunities, to judge by the aging of the text, the wall read

 ELPHIE LIVES!

 OZMA LIVES!

 THEWIZARD LIVES!

 And then

 EVERYONE LIVES BUT US.

 Trism dumped him in the cab and paid for it, and gave the driver directions. Then Trism disappeared back into the pub before Liir could even thank him. So Liir settled back against the moldy cushions.

 Everyone lives but us.

 Nor was somewhere in Shiz. Shiz. Where was that?

 He would find her. He should find her. He should leap from the cab right now and go find her. He tried to sit up, but the world beyond the isinglass windows was unsettled and rolled about as if on the backs of a school of earthquakes. When he was deposited at the barracks, his feet found their way to his bunk while his head tried not to hurt, and also tried to remember what was so important.

 

 HE WAS HALFWAY PACKEDnext morning when he recalled Shell’s comment about Nor. Through the sawteeth of his headache he grappled with the question. What to do? Packing, he paused over the cape—leave it behind, leave all the past filed in its pleats? He didn’t want to deal with that decision now, while his head hurt. Easier to pack the old thing. Easier to bind the broom’s head in a cloth so it would look less womanly, and tie the thing to the satchel laces. Postpone chucking these things out for good. Any minute now inspiration would strike. An idea would form, and as if by magic the courage to follow that idea would flare up. If only his head wouldn’t pound so!

 Now’s a good time for an idea, he said, as he joined his mates in formation to receive orders.

 Commander Cherrystone had not been informed about his own new assignment, it appeared, until that very dawn; he arrived at the head of the transport column with an unpinned collar and crumbs in his trim, silvering beard. His expression was thunder. He delivered his instructions in a throttled tone. No one dared ask a question. When the chaplain arrived, Commander Cherrystone didn’t join in the public atonements delivered under open skies to the Unnamed God, in exchange for the success of their mission. Whatever it might turn out to be.

 We leave in an hour, said the Commander.

 So, oh, what next? If only he had more oomph this morning! Or if he had a place to rest his head till the screech of today calmed down.

 He finished clearing his trunk. Unlike all the other men, he had no private books, no mezzotints of family grandees, no clutches of letters from admonitory father or teary mother or whispery girl back home. He was bereft of the more traditional impedimenta, and determined to be proud of it.

 He waited in the yard beside the basilica. What did he take of his mock parents? If Fiyero had been his dad, really, Liir had got nothing from him but a possible half-sister. No model of comportment, no word of wisdom, no wallet fattened with funds, no blessing.

 If Elphaba had been his mother, he got something more—that much was sure. But what? She had acted to pervert fate, to interrupt and bludgeon history into shape—to topple the wonderful Wizard of Oz, no less—and what good had it gotten her? She was fierce and futile at everything she attempted. What kind of a lesson was that?

 She hadn’t talked to him much. Only in a cast-off manner. One lunchtime she’d seethed, more to herself than to him; It isn’t whether you do it well or ill, it’s that you do it all, she’d said, dumping her attempt at poached eggs on the floor and hurrying back to the books and charms in her tower. That was her legacy, and it didn’t add up to much.

 So perhaps he should consider the absence of good advice a kind of direction from the universe: Follow where you are led, and take it from there. Maybe fate intends to lead you to Nor. It’s gotten you this far, hasn’t it?

 It was easier to be passive, easier on his brain anyway. His cohorts gathered for departure while he congratulated himself for sorting this out.

 And it was indisputably thrilling to fall into formation to the punch of snare drums. The men squared their shoulders and became Men. The wind obliged by whipping the banners and emblems: it was all so glorious and immediate.

 The four departing companies of the Home Guard were now colloquially named the Seventh Spear, after some magic weapon in a children’s fable that Liir had never heard told. The convoy marched in formation through the smell of sweet morning loaves, as Emerald City shopkeepers were unshuttering their windows and washing down the paving stones.

 What a joy there was in movement! Liir hadn’t realized how petty he’d become, worrying daily about the gloss on his boots, the snap in his retort. The Guard’s culture had trained him into thinking that a well-brushed smile and a groomed chin were somehow vital to the preservation of the nation.

 He saw the Emerald City—perhaps for the last time?—as if for the first. And how fitting it seemed that the Seventh Spear was shafting its way through the capital toward Westgate, the portal through which Liir had first made his approach. They marched past the polished half-domes and buttresses of the Wizard’s Palace—still called that, even now. The sun came out and glazed the marble; one could hardly look at it. A giant broody hen. From this angle, a distance north: the grimmer spectacle of Southstairs, lurking behind the hunched shoulders of its walls.

 Everywhere else—on this boulevard, anyway—the allure of healthy commerce. Cafés catering, at this hour, to merchants on their way to their warehouses. Stalls of books, pottery, feathery remnants to adorn hats and hems. A display, arrayed under a bentlebranch arbor, of several dozen tribal carpets imported from the Vinkus, suggesting that the West was trading with the capital these days. And floral silks from Gillikinese artisans, sprays of lavender and lime, to upholster furniture in better parlors. One merchant had hung an entire chandelier, chase-worked mettanite with crystal pendants, from the bicep of a healthy oak, and he had arranged below it a dining area for eighteen—table, chairs, Dixxi House porcelain settings and silver service, with linen napkins folded to look like swans, one at each place setting.

 That those who headed the nation could enjoy their meals in such luxury!—the men marched with firmer step. The vitality of the capital gave life to their cause.

 The Seventh Spear turned a corner, continuing toward Westgate. Liir recognized the warehouse district through which he’d passed with Dorothy and her friends. The convoy paused while Commander Cherrystone negotiated some last-minute business with a wine merchant, and the soldiers were allowed to fall out of formation. Bleary from last night’s mistakes, Liir wandered to the brighter side of the street. He propped himself against the wall of an abandoned granary of some sort. Putting one heel against the wall, he closed his eyes and lifted his face to get some sun.

 The warmth of the walls behind him, the pleasure of being between moments of his own history…his skittery mind indulged in a waking dream. His thoughts wandered up the cracked plaster walls of the corn-house. It was as if he were looking down at himself from the window on the second level. That’s me down there, that young soldier, anthracite-haired, trim, smart enough, having his moment of rest…How handsome a figure he managed to seem, from this vantage point: shoulders acceptably broad, the windblown hair on his scalp, the knee thrust forward. A soldier doing the work of the empire: a good guy.

 Then the focus of his attentions backed up—for that fragment of an instant in which a revery implies eternity—and Liir had the sense that the young soldier at street level was out of sight again, and out of mind; and the two people who might have been looking out at him from some private aerie above had turned their attention back to each other, lovingly.

 Must be the sun! Must be the beer! Filthy slutty mind he had, after all.

 Straighten out! barked Cherrystone, and they did, and he did.

 

 THROUGHWESTGATE,they turned to the south. The lads knew the habits of the sun enough to be able to tell that much. They marched as suited the Commander’s whim—more relaxed when in the rural outback, in parade formation when passing through villages. The companies tented at night, found the dried lentils and local celery exotic and filling, alternated hymns of patriotism to Oz with anthems of devotion to the Unnamed God, and didn’t bring out the bawdier ditties until Commander Cherrystone had retired for the night.

 Fording the Gillikin River, they came to a broad sweep of pebbly waste, marked here and there by stands of scrub maple and pencilnut. Once they stopped for water at a kind of oasis, a mauntery of some sort, hoping that some novices would come scupper for them—lean down to reach the bucket, and show evidence of some lovely curve beneath their voluminous habits. But the maunts who supplied some succor were desiccated old biddies who had no curves to flaunt.