Book 1 - Munchkinlanders

From the crumpled bed the wife said, “I think today’s the day. Look how I’ve gone.”

“Today? That would be like you, perverse and inconvenient,” said her husband, teasing her, standing at the doorway and looking outward, over the lake, the fields, the forested slopes beyond. He could just make out the chimneys of Rush Margins, breakfast fires smoking. “The worst possible moment for my ministry. Naturally.”

The wife yawned. “There’s not a lot of choice involved. From what I hear. Your body gets this big and it takes over-if you can’t accommodate it, sweetheart, you just get out of its way. It’s on a track of its own and nothing stops it now.” She pushed herself up, trying to see over the rise of her belly. “I feel like a hostage to myself. Or to the baby.”

“Exert some self-control.” He came to her side and helped her sit up. “Think of it as a spiritual exercise. Custody of the senses. Bodily as well as ethical continence.”

“Self-control?” She laughed, inching toward the edge of the bed. “I have no self left. I’m only a host for the parasite. Where’s my self anyway? Where’d I leave that tired old thing?”

“Think of me.” His tone had changed; he meant this.

“Frex”-she headed him off-“when the volcano’s ready there’s no priest in the world can pray it quiet.”

“What will my fellow ministers think?”

“They’ll get together and say, ‘Brother Frexspar, did you allow your wife to deliver your first child when you had a community problem to solve? How inconsiderate of you; it shows a lack of authority. You’re fired from the position.” She was ribbing him now, for there was no one to fire

him. The nearest bishop was too distant to pay attention to the particulars of a unionist cleric in the hinterland.

“It’s just such terrible timing.”

“I do think you bear half the blame for the timing,” she said. “I mean, after all, Frex.”

“That’s how the thinking goes, but I wonder.”

“You wonder?” She laughed, her head going far back. The line from her ear to the hollow below her throat reminded Frex of an elegant silver ladle. Even in morning disarray, with a belly like a scow, she was majestically good-looking. Her hair had the bright lacquered look of wet fallen oak leaves in sunlight. He blamed her for being born to privilege and admired her efforts to overcome it-and all the while he loved her, too.

“You mean you wonder if you’re the father”-she grabbed the bedstead; Frex took hold of her other arm and hauled her half-upright-“or do you question the fatherliness of men in general?” She stood, mammoth, an ambulatory island. Moving out the door at a slug’s pace, she laughed at such an idea. He could hear her laughing from the outhouse even as he began to dress for the day’s battle.

Frex combed his beard and oiled his scalp. He fastened a clasp of bone and rawhide at the nape of his neck, to keep the hair out of his face, because his expressions today had to be readable from a distance: There could be no fuzziness to his meaning. He applied some coal dust to darken his eyebrows, a smear of red wax on his flat cheeks. He shaded his lips. A handsome priest attracted more penitents than a homely one.

In the kitchen yard Melena floated gently, not with the normal gravity of pregnancy but as if inflated, a huge balloon trailing its strings through the dirt. She carried a skillet in one hand and a few eggs and the whiskery tips of autumn chives in the other. She sang to herself, but only in short phrases. Frex wasn’t meant to hear her.

His sober gown buttoned tight to the collar, his sandals strapped on over leggings, Frex took from its hiding place-beneath a chest of drawers-the report sent to him from his fellow minister over in the village of Three Dead Trees. He hid the brown pages within his sash. He had been keeping them from his wife, afraid that she would want to come along-to see the fun, if it was amusing, or to suffer the thrill of it if it was terrifying.

As Frex breathed deeply, readying his lungs for a day of oratory, Melena dangled a wooden spoon in the skillet and stirred the eggs. The tinkle of cowbells sounded across the lake. She did not listen; or she listened but to something else, to something inside her. It was sound without melody-like dream music, remembered for its effect but not for its harmonic distresses and recoveries. She imagined it was the child inside her, humming for happiness. She knew he would be a singing child.

Melena heard Frex inside, beginning to extemporize, warming up, calling forth the rolling phrases of his argument, convincing himself again of his righteousness.

How did that proverb go, the one that Nanny singsonged to her, years ago, in the nursery?

Born in the morning,

Woe without warning;

Afternoon child

Woeful and wild;

Born in the evening,

Woe ends in grieving.

Night baby borning

Same as the morning.

But she remembered this as a joke, fondly. Woe is the natural end of life, yet we go on having babies.

No, said Nanny, an echo in Melena’s mind (and editorializing as usual): No, no, you pretty little pampered hussy. We don’t go on having babies, that’s quite apparent. We only have babies when we’re young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it-we’re slow learners, we women-we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production.

But men don’t dry up, Melena objected; they can father to the death.

Ah, we’re slow learners, Nanny countered. But they can’t learn at all.

“Breakfast,” said Melena, spooning eggs onto a wooden plate. Her son would not be as dull as most men. She would raise him up to defy the onward progress of woe.

“It is a time of crisis for our society,” recited Frex. For a man who condemned worldly pleasures he ate with elegance. She loved to watch the arabesque of fingers and two forks. She suspected that beneath his righteous asceticism he possessed a hidden longing for the easy life.

“Every day is a great crisis for our society.” She was being flip, answering him in the terms men use. Dear thick thing, he didn’t hear the irony in her voice.

“We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned.”

He wasn’t talking to her so much as practicing his tirade against the coming spectacle of violence and magic. There was a side to Frex that verged on despair; unlike most men, he was able to channel it to benefit his life’s work. With some difficulty she set herself down on a bench. Whole choruses were singing wordlessly inside her head! Was this common for every labor and delivery? She would have liked to ask the nosy local women who would come around this afternoon, growling shyly at her condition. But she didn’t dare. She couldn’t jettison her pretty accent, which they found affected-but she could avoid sounding ignorant about these basic matters.

Frex noticed her silence. “You’re not angry I’m leaving you today?”

“Angry?” She raised her eyebrows, as if she had never encountered the concept before.

“History crawls along on the peg legs of small individual lives,” said Frex, “and at the same time larger eternal forces converge. You can’t attend to both arenas at once.”

“Our child may not have a small life.”

“Now isn’t the time to argue. Do you want to distract me from holy work today? We’re facing the presence of real evil in Rush Margins. I couldn’t live with myself if I ignored it.” He meant this, and for such intensity she had fallen in love with him; but she hated him for it too, of course.

“Threats come-they’ll come again.” Her last word on the subject. “Your son will only be born once, and if this watery upheaval inside is any indication, I think it’s today.”

“There will be other children.”

She turned away so he could not see the rage in her face.

But she couldn’t sustain the fury at him. Perhaps this was her moral failing. (She wasn’t much given to worrying about moral failings as a rule; having a minister as a husband seemed to stir enough religious thought for one couple.) She lapsed sullenly into silence. Frex nibbled at his meal.

“It’s the devil,” said Frex, sighing. “The devil is coming.”

“Don’t say a thing like that on a day our child is expected!”

“I mean the temptation in Rush Margins! And you know what I mean, Melena!”

“Words are words, and what’s said is said!” she answered. “I don’t require all your attention, Frex, but I do need some of it!” She dropped the skillet with a crash on the bench that stood against the cottage wall.

“Well, and likewise,” he said. “What do you think I’m up against today? How can I convince my flock to turn away from the razzle-dazzle spectacle of idolatry? I will probably come back tonight having lost to a smarter attraction. You might achieve a child today. I look forward to failure.” Still, as he said this he looked proud; to fail in the cause of a high moral concern was satisfying to him. How could it compare with the flesh, blood, mess, and noise of having a baby?

He stood at last to leave. A wind came up over the lake now, smudging the topmost reaches of the columns of kitchen smoke. They looked, thought Melena, like funnels of water swirling down drains in narrowing, focusing spirals.

“Be well, my love,” said Frex, although he had his stern public expression on, from forehead to toes.

“Yes.” Melena sighed. The child punched her, deep down, and she had to hurry to the outhouse again. “Be holy, and I’ll be thinking of you-my backbone, my breastplate. And also try not to be killed.”

“The will of the Unnamed God,” said Frex.

“My will too,” she said, blasphemously.

“Apply your will to that which deserves it,” he answered. Now he was the minister and she the sinner, an arrangement she did not particularly enjoy.

“Good-bye,” she said, and chose the stink and relief of the outhouse over standing to wave him out of sight as he strode along the road to Rush Margins.

Frex was more concerned for Melena than she knew. He stopped at the first fisherman’s hut he saw and spoke with the man at the half-door. Could a woman or two spend the day and if needed the night with Melena? It would be a kindness. Frex nodded with a wince of gratitude, acknowledging without words that Melena was not a great favorite in these parts.

Then, before continuing around the end of Illswater and over to Rush Margins, he stopped at a fallen tree and drew two letters from his sash.

The writer was a distant cousin of Frex’s, also a minister. Weeks earlier the cousin had spent rime and valuable ink on a description of what was being called the Clock of the Time Dragon. Frex prepared himself for the day’s holy campaign by rereading about the idol clock.

I write in haste, Brother Frexspar, to catch my impressions before they fade.

The Clock of the Time Dragon is mounted on a wagon and stands as high as a giraffe. It is nothing more than a tottering, freestanding theatre, punched on all four sides with alcoves and

proscenium arches. On the flat roof is a clockwork dragon, an invention of green painted leather, silvery claws, ruby jeweled eyes. Its skin is made of hundreds of overlapping discs of copper, bronze, and iron. Beneath the flexible folds of its scales is an armature controlled by clockwork. The Time Dragon circles on its pedestal, flexes its narrow leathery wings (they make a sound like a bellows), and belches out sulfurous balls of flaming orange stink.

Below, featured in the dozens of doorways, windows, and porches, are puppets, marionettes, figurines. Creatures of folk tale. Caricatures of peasants and royalty alike. Animals and fairies and saints-our unionist saints, Brother Frexspar, stolen out from underneath us! I get enraged. The figures move on sprockets. They wheel in and out of doorways. They bend at the waist, they dance and dawdle and daily with each other.

Who had engendered this Time Dragon, this fake oracle, this propaganda tool for wickedness that challenged the power of unionism and of the Unnamed God? The clock’s handlers were a dwarf and some narrow-waisted minions who seemed to have only enough brain capacity among them to pass a hat. Who else was benefiting besides the dwarf and his beauty boys?

The cousin’s second letter had warned that the clock was making its way next to Rush Margins. It had told a more specific story.

The entertainment began with a thrum of strings and a rattle of bones. The crowd pushed close, oohing. Within the lighted window of a stage, we saw a marriage bed, with a puppet wife and husband. The husband was asleep and the wife sighed. She made a motion with her carved hands to suggest that her husband was disappointingly small. The audience shrieked with laughter. The puppet wife went to sleep herself. ‘When she was snoring, the puppet husband sneaked Out of bed.

At this point, up above, the Dragon turned on its base, and pointed its talons into the crowd, indicating_without a doubt- a humble well digger named Grine, who has been a faithful if inattentive husband. Then the dragon reared back and stretched two fingers in a come-hither gesture, isolating a widow named Letta and her snaggle-toothed maiden daughter. The crowd hushed and fell away from Crine, Letta, and the blushing maid, as if they had suddenly been inflicted with running sores.

The Dragon rested again but draped a wing over another archway, which lit up to reveal the puppet husband, wandering out in the night. Along came a puppet widow, with sprigged hair

and high color, dragging along a protesting, flinty-toothed daughter. The kissed the puppet husband, and pulled off his leather trousers. He was equipped with two full sets of male goods, one in the front and another hanging off the base of his spine. The widow positioned her daughter on the abbreviated prong in the front, and herself took advantage of the morning arrangement in the rear. The three puppets bucked and rocked, emitting squeals of glee. When the puppet widow and her daughter were through, they dismounted and kissed the adulterous puppet husband. Then they kneed him, simultaneously, fore and aft. He swung on springs and hinges, trying to hold all his wounded parts.

The audience roared. Crine, the actual well digger, sweated drops as big as grapes. Letta pretended to guffaw, but her daughter had already disappeared from shame. Before the evening was out, Crine was set upon by his agitated neighbors and investigated for the grotesque anomaly. Letta was shunned. Her daughter seems to have vanished entirely. We suspect the worst.

At least Grine wasn t killed. Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at much indignity, don’ t you agree?

Sometimes it seemed to Frex that every itinerant witch and toothless gibbering seer in Oz who could perform even the most transparent of spells had seized on the outback district of Wend Hardings to scratch out a trade. He knew that folks from Rush Margins were humble. Their lives were hard and their hopes few. As the drought dragged on, their traditional unionist faith was eroding. Frex was aware that the Clock of the Time Dragon combined the appeals of ingenuity and magic-and he would have to call on his deepest reserves of religious conviction to overcome it. If his congregation should prove vulnerable to the so-called pleasure faith, succumbing to spectacle and violence-well, what next?

He would prevail. He was their minister. He had pulled their teeth and buried their babies and blessed their kitchen pots for years now. He had abased himself in their names. He had wandered with an unkempt

beard and a begging bowl from hamlet to hamlet, leaving poor Melena alone in the minister’s lodge for weeks at a time. He had sacrificed for them. They couldn’t be swayed by this Time Dragon creature. They owed him.

He moved on, shoulders squared, jaw set, stomach in a sour uproar. The sky was brown with flying sand and grit. The wind rushed high over the bills with the sound of a tremulous wail, as if pushing through some fissure of rock, on a ridge beyond any Frex could see.

It was nearly evening by the time Frex had worked up the courage to enter the ramshackle hamlet of Rush Margins. He was in a deep sweat. He hit his heels to the ground and pumped his clenched fists, and called out in a hoarse, carrying tone. “Hist, oh ye of small confidence! Gather while ye may, for temptation is abroad, to try ye sorely!” The words were archaic, even ridiculous, but they worked. Here came the sullen fishermen, dragging their empty nets up from the dock. Here came the subsistence farmers, whose hardscrabble plots had borne little during this dry year. Before he had even begun, they all looked guilty as sin.

They followed him to the rickety steps of the canoe repair house. Frex knew that everyone expected this evil clock to arrive at any instant; gossip was as contagious as the plague. He yelled at them for their thirsty anticipation. “Ye are dull as toddlers reaching their hands to touch the pretty embers! Ye are as if spawn of dragon womb, ready to suck on teats of fire!” These were time-worn scriptural imprecations and they fell a little flat tonight; he was tired and not at his best.

“Brother Frexspar,” said Bree, the mayor of Rush Margins, “could you perhaps tone down your harangue until we get a chance to see what fresh new form temptation might take?”

“You have no mettle to resist new forms,” said Frex, spitting.

“Haven’t you been our able teacher- these several years?” said Bree. “We’ve hardly had such a good chance to prove ourselves against sin! We’re looking forward to-to the spiritual test of it all.”

The fishermen laughed and jeered, and Frex intensified his glower, but at the sound of unfamiliar wheels in the stony ruts of the road, they all turned their heads and fell silent. He had lost their attention before he had gotten started.

The clock was being drawn by four horses and escorted by the dwarf and his cohort of young thugs. Its broad roof was crowned by the dragon. But what a beast! It looked poised as if ready to spring, as if indeed invested with life. The skin of the house was decorated in carnival colors, burnished with gold leaf. The fishermen gaped as it drew near.

Before the dwarf could announce the time of the performance, before the crowd of youths could draw out their clubs, Frex leaped on the lower step of the thing-a fold-down stage on hinges. “Why is this thing called a clock? The only clock face it has is flat, dull, and lost in all that distracting detail. Furthermore, the hands don’t move: Look, see for yourselves! They’re painted to remain at one minute before midnight! All you’ll see here is mechanics, my friends: I know this for a fact. You’ll see mechanical cornfields growing, moons waxing and waning, a volcano to spew a soft red cloth done up with black and red sequins. With all this tiktoky business, why not have a pair of circulating arms on the clock face? Why not? I ask you, I’m asking you, yes, you, Gawnette, and you, Stoy, and you, Perippa. Why no real clock here?”

They were not listening, Gawnette and Stoy and Perippa, nor were the others. They were too busy staring in anticipation.

“The answer, of course, is that the clock isn’t meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul. Redemption and condemnation time. For the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment.

“One minute short of judgment, my friends! If you died in the next sixty seconds, would you want to spend eternity in the suffocating depths reserved for idolaters?”

“Awful lot of noise in the neighborhood tonight,” said someone in the shadows-and the spectators laughed. Above Frex-he whirled to see-from a little door had emerged a small, yapping puppet dog, its hair dark and as tightly curled as Frex’s own. The dog bounced on a spring, and the pitch of its chatter was annoyingly high. The laughter grew. Evening fell harder, and it was less easy for Frex to tell who was laughing, who now was shouting for him to move aside so they could see.

He wouldn’t move, so he was bundled unceremoniously from his perch. The dwarf gave a poetic welcome. “All our lives are activity without meaning; we burrow rat-like into life and we squirm rat-like through it and rat-like we are flung into our graves at the end. Now and then, why shouldn’t we

hear a voice of prophecy, or see a miracle play? Beneath the apparent sham and indignity of our rat-like lives, a humble pattern and meaning still applies! Come nearer, my good people, and watch what a little extra knowledge augurs for your lives! The Time Dragon sees before and beyond and within the truth of your sorry span of years here! Look at what it shows you!”

The crowd pushed forward. The moon had risen, its light like the eye of an angry, vengeful god. “Give over, let me go,” Frex called; it was worse than he had thought. He had never been manhandled by his own congregation.

The clock unfolded story about a publicly pious man, with lamb’s wool beard and dark curly locks, who preached simplicity, poverty, and generosity while keeping a hidden coffer of gold and emeralds-in the double-hinged bosom of a weak-chinned daughter of blue blood society. The scoundrel was run through with a long iron stake in a most indelicate way and served up to his hungry flock as Roast Flank of Minister.

“This panders to your basest instincts!” Frex yelled, his arms folded and his face magenta with fury.

But now that darkness was almost total, someone came up from behind him to silence him. An arm encircled his neck. He twisted to see which damned parishioner took such liberties, but all the faces were cloaked by hoods. He was kneed in the groin and doubled over, his face in the dirt. A foot kicked him square between the buttocks and his bowels released. The rest of the crowd, however, was not watching. They were howling with mirth at some other entertainment put on by the Clock Dragon. A sympathetic woman in a widow’s shawl grabbed his arm and led him away-he was too fouled, too much in pain to straighten up and see who it was. “I’ll put you down in the root cellar, I will, under a burlap,” crooned the goodwife, “for they’ll be after you tonight with pitchforks, the way that thing is behaving itself They’ll look for you in your lodge, but they won’t look in my keeping room.”

“Melena,” he croaked, “they’ll find her-“

“She’ll be seen to,” said his neighbor. “We women can manage that much, I guess!”

In the minister’s lodge, Melena struggled with consciousness as a pair of midwives went in and out of focus before her. One was a fishwife, the

other a palsied crone; they took turns feeling tier forehead, peeing between her legs, and stealing glances at the few beautiful trinkets and treasures Melena had managed to bring here from Coiwen Grounds.

“You chew that paste of pinlobble leaves, duckie, you do that. You’ll be unconscious before you know it,” said the fishwife. “You’ll relax, out will pop the little sweetheart, and all will be well in the morning. Thought you would smell of rosewater and fairy dew, but you stink like the rest of us. Chew on, my duckie, chew on.”

At the sound of a knock, the crone looked up guiltily from the chest she was kneeling before and rummaging through. She let the lid close with a bang and affected a position of prayer, eyes closed. “Enter,” she called.

A maiden with tender skin and high color came in. “Oh, I hoped someone would be here,” she said. “How is she?”

“Nearly out and so is the babe,” answered the fishwife. “An hour more, I reckon.”

“Well, I’m told to warn you. The men are drunk and on the prowl. They’ve been riled up by that dragon of the magic clock, you know, and are looking for Frex to kill him. The clock said to. They’ll likely stagger out here. We’d better get the wife safely away-can she be moved?”

No, I cannot be moved, thought Melena, and if the peasants find Frex tell them to kill him good and hard for me, for I never knew a pain so extraordinary that it made me see the blood behind my own eyes. Kill him for doing this to me. At this thought, she smiled in a moment of relief and passed out.

“Let’s leave her here and run for it!” said the maiden. “The clock said to kill her too, and the little dragon she’s going to give birth to. I don’t want to get caught.”

“We’ve got our own reputations to uphold,” said the fishwife. “We can’t abandon the fancy ladything in mid-delivery. I don’t care what any clock says.”

The crone, her head back in the chest, said, “Anyone for some real lace from Gillikin?”

“There’s a hay cart in the lower field, but let’s do it now,” said the fishwife. “Come, help me fetch it. You, old mother hag, get your face out of the linens and come dampen this pretty pink brow. Right-o, now we go.”

A few minutes later the crone, the wife, and the maiden were trundling the hay cart along a rarely used track through the spindles and bracken of the autumn woods. The wind had picked up. It whistled over the treeless foreheads of the Cloth Hills. Melena, sprawled in blankets, heaved and moaned in unconscious pain.

They heard a drunken mob pass, with pitchforks and torches, and the women stood silent and terrified, listening to the slurred curses. Then they pressed on with greater urgency until they came upon a foggy copse-the edge of the graveyard for unconsecrated corpses. Within it they saw the blurred outlines of the clock. It had been left here for safekeeping by the dwarf-no fool he; he could guess this particular corner of the world was the last place jumpy villagers would seek tonight. “The dwarf and his boykins were drinking in the tavern too,” said the maiden breathlessly. “There’s no one here to stop us!”

The crone said, “So you’ve been peering in the tavern windows at the men, you slut?” She pushed open the door in the back of the clock.

She found a crawl space. Pendulums hung ominously in the gloom. Huge toothed wheels looked primed to slice any trespasser into sausage rounds. “Come on, drag her in,” said the crone.

The night of torches and fog gave way, at dawn, to broad bluffs of thundercloud, dancing skeletons of lightning. Glimpses of blue sky appeared briefly, though sometimes it rained so hard that it seemed more like mud drops falling than water. The midwives, crawling on hands and knees out of the back of the clock-wagon, had their little discharge at last. They protected the infant from the dripping gutter. “Look, a rainbow,” said the senior, bobbing her head. A sickly scarf of colored light hung in the sky.

What they saw, rubbing the caul and blood off the skin-was it just a trick of the light? After all, following the storm the grass did seem to throb with its own color, the roses zinged and hovered with crazy glory on their stems. But even with these effects of light and atmosphere, the midwives couldn’t deny what they saw. Beneath the spit of the mother’s fluids the infant glistened a scandalous shade of pale emerald.

There was no wail, no bark of newborn outrage. The child opened its mouth, breathed, and then kept its own counsel. “Whine, you fiend,” said the crone, “it’s your first job.” The baby shirked its obligations.

“Another willful boy,” said the fishwife, sighing. “Shall we kill it?”

“Don’t be so nasty to it,” said the crone, “it’s a girl.”

“Hah,” said the bleary-eyed maiden, “look again, there’s the weather vane.”

For a minute they were in disagreement, even with the child naked before them. Only after a second and third rub was it clear that the child was indeed feminine. Perhaps in labor some bit of organic effluvia had become caught and quickly dried in the cloven place. Once toweled, she was observed to be prettily formed, with a long elegant head, forearms nicely turned out, clever pinching little buttocks, cunning fingers with scratchy little nails.

And an undeniable green cast to the skin. There was a salmon blush in the cheeks and belly, a beige effect around the clenched eyelids, a tawny stripe on the scalp showing the pattern of eventual hair. But the primary effect was vegetable.

“Look what we get for our troubles,” said the maiden. “A little green pat of butter. Why don’t we kill it? You know what people will say.”

“I think it’s rotten,” said the fishwife, and checked for the root of a tail, counted fingers and toes. “It smells like dung.”

“That is dung you’re smelling, you idiot. You’re squatting in a cow pattypie.”

“It’s sick, it’s feeble, that’s why the color. Lose it in the puddle, drown the thing. She’ll never know. She’ll be out for hours in her ladylike faints.”

They giggled. They cradled the infant in the crook of their arms, passing it around to test it for weight and balance. To kill it was the kindest course of action. The question was how.

Then the child yawned, and the fishwife absentmindedly gave it a finger to nurse on, and the child bit the finger off at the second knuckle. It almost choked on the gush of blood. The digit dropped out of its mouth into the mud like a bobbin. The women catapulted into action. The fishwife lunged to strangle the girl, and the crone and the maiden flared up in defense. The finger was dug out of the mire and shoved in an apron pocket, possibly to sew back onto the hand that had lost it. “It’s a cock, she just realized she didn’t have one,” screeched the maiden, and

fell on the ground laughing. “Oh, beware the stupid boy first tries to please himself with her! She’ll snip his young sprout off for a souvenir!”

The midwives crawled back into the clock and dropped the thing at its mother’s breast, afraid to consider mercy murder for fear of what else the baby might bite. “Maybe she’ll chop the tit next, that’ll bring Her Drowsy Frailness around quick enough,” the crone chuckled. “Though what a child, that sips blood even before its first suck of mother’s milk!” They left a pipkin of water nearby, and under cover of the next squall they went squelching away, to find their sons and husbands and brothers, and berate and beat them if they were available, or bury them if not.

In the shadows, the infant stared overhead at the oiled and regular teeth of time’s clock.

For days Melena couldn’t bear to look at the thing. She held it, as a mother must. She waited for the groundwater of maternal affection to rise and overwhelm her. She did not weep. She chewed pinlobble leaves, to float away from the disaster.

It was a she. It was a her. Melena practiced conversions in her thinking when she was alone. The twitching, unhappy bundle was not male; it was not neutered; it was a female. It slept, looking like a heap of cabbage leaves washed and left to drain on the table.

In a panic, Melena wrote to Coiwen Grounds to drag Nanny from her retirement. Frex went ahead in a carriage to collect Nanny from the way station at Stonespar End. On the trip back, Nanny asked Frex what was wrong.

“What is wrong.” He sighed, and was lost in thought. Nanny realized she had chosen her words poorly; now Frex was distracted. He began to mumble in a general way about the nature of evil. A vacuum set up by the inexplicable absence of the Unnamed God, and into which spiritual poison must rush. A vortex.

“I mean what is the state of the child!” retorted Nanny explosively. “It’s not the universe but a single child I need to hear about, if I’m going to be any help! Why does Melena call for me instead of for her mother? Why is there no letter for her grandfather? He’s the Eminent Thropp, for goodness sakes! Melena can’t have forgotten her duties so thoroughly, or is life out there in the country worse than we thought?”

“It’s worse than we thought,” said Frex grimly. “The baby-you had better be prepared, Nanny, so you don’t scream-the baby is damaged.”

“Damaged?” Nanny’s grip on her valise tightened and she looked out over the red-leafed pearlfruit trees by the side of the road. “Frex, tell me everything.”

“It’s a girl,” said Frex.

“Damage indeed,” said Nanny mockingly, but Frex as usual missed the dig. “Well, at least the family title’s preserved for another generation. Has she got all her limbs?” -

“Yes.”

“Any more than she needs?”

“No.”

“Is she sucking?”

“We can’t let it. It has extraordinary teeth, Nanny. It has shark’s teeth, or something like.”

“Well she won’t be the first child to grow on a bottle or a rag instead of a tit, don’t worry about that.”

“It’s the wrong color,” said Frex.

“What color is the wrong color?”

For a few moments Frex could only shake his head. Nanny did not like him and she would not like him, but she softened. “Frex, it can’t be that bad. There’s always a way out. Tell Nanny.”

“It’s green,” he finally said. “Nanny, it’s green as moss.”

“She’s green, you mean. It’s a she, for heaven’s sake.”

“It’s not for heaven’s sake.” Frex began to weep. “Heaven is not improved by it, Nanny; and heaven does not approve. What are we to do!”

“Hush.” Nanny detested weeping men. “It can’t be as bad as all that. There isn’t a sniff of low blood in Melena’s veins. Whatever blight the child has will respond to Nanny’s treatment. Trust Nanny.”

“I trusted in the Unnamed God,” sobbed Frex.

“We don’t always work at cross purposes, God and Nanny,” said Nanny. She knew this was blasphemous, but she couldn’t resist a gibe as long as Frex’s resistance was down. “But don’t worry, I won’t breathe a word to Melena’s family. We’ll sort this all out in a flash, and no one need know. The baby has a name?”

“Elphaba,” he said.

“After Saint Aelphaba of the Waterfall?”

“Yes.”

“A fine old name. You’ll use the common nickname Fabala, I suppose.”

“Who even knows if she’ll live long enough to grow into a nickname.” Frex sounded as if he hoped this would be the case.

“Interesting country, are we in Wend Hardings yet?” Nanny asked, to change the subject. But Frex had folded up inside, barely bothering to guide the horses onto the correct track. The country was filthy, depressed, peasant-ridden; Nanny began to wish she had not set out in her best traveling gown. Roadside robbers might expect to find gold on such a refined-looking older woman, and they would be right, for Nanny sported a golden garter stolen years ago from Her Ladyship’s boudoir. What a humiliation, if the garter should turn up these years later on Nanny’s well-turned if aging thigh! But Nanny’s fears were unfounded, for the carriage arrived, without incident, in the yard of the minister’s cottage.

“Let me see the baby first,” said Nanny. “It will be easier and fairer on Melena if I know what we’re dealing with.” And this wasn’t hard to arrange, as Melena was out cold thanks to pinlobble leaves, while the baby in a basket on the table wailed softly.

Nanny drew up a chair so she wouldn’t hurt herself if she fainted dead away. “Frex, put the basket on the floor where I can look into it.” Frex obliged, and then went to return the horses and carriage to Bree, who rarely needed them for mayoral duties but loaned them out to earn a little political capital.

The infant was wrapped in linens, Nanny saw, and the baby’s mouth and ears were strapped with a sling. The nose looked like a knob of bad mushroom, poking up for air, and the eyes were open.

Nanny leaned closer. The child couldn’t be, what, three weeks old? Yet as Nanny moved from side to side, looking at the profile of the forehead from this angle and that, so as to judge the shape of the mind, the girl’s eyes tracked her back and forth. They were brown and rich, the color of overturned earth, flecked with mica. There was a network of fragile red lines at each soft angle where the eyelids met, as if the girl had been bursting the blood threads from the exertion of watching and understanding.

And the skin, oh yes, the skin was green as sin. Not an ugly color, Nanny thought. Just not a human color.

She reached out and let her finger drift across the baby’s cheek. The infant flinched, and her backbone arched, and the wrapping, which was

tucked securely around the child from neck to toe, split open like a husk. Nanny gritted her teeth and was determined not to be cowed. The baby had exposed herself sternum to groin, and the skin on her chest was the same remarkable color. “Have you even touched this child yet, you two?” murmured Nanny. She put her hand palm down on the child’s heaving chest, her fingers covering the almost invisible baby nipples, then slid her hand down so she could check the apparatus below. The child was wet and soiled but felt made according to standard design. The skin was the same miracle of pliant smoothness that Melena had possessed as an Infant.

“Come to Nanny, you horrid little thing you.” Nanny leaned to pick the baby up, mess and all.

The baby swiveled to avoid the touch. Her head beat itself against the rush bottom of the basket.

“You’ve been dancing in the womb, I see,” said Nanny, “I wonder to whose music? Such well-developed muscles! No, you’re not getting away from me. Come here, you little demon. Nanny doesn’t care. Nanny likes you.” She was lying through her teeth, but unlike Frex she believed some lies were sanctioned by heaven.

And she got her hands on Elphaba, and settled her on her lap. There Nanny waited, crooning and every now and then looking away, out the window, to recover herself and keep from vomiting. She rubbed the baby’s belly to calm the girl down, but there was no calming her down, not yet anyway.

Melena propped herself up on her elbows in the late afternoon when Nanny brought a tray with tea and bread. “I have made myself at home,” said Nanny, “and I’ve made friends with your tiny darling. Now come to your senses, sweetheart, and let me give you a kiss.”

“Oh, Nanny!” Melena allowed herself to be coddled. “Thank you for coming. Have you seen the little monster?”

“She’s adorable,” said Nanny.

“Don’t lie and don’t be soft,” said Melena. “If you’re going to help you must be honest.”

“If I’m going to help, you must be honest,” said Nanny. “We need not go into it now, but I will have to know everything, my sweet. So we can decide what’s to be done.” They sipped their tea, and because

Elphaba had fallen asleep at last, it seemed for a few moments like the old days at Colwen Grounds, when Melena would come home from afternoon walks with lithesome young gentry on the make, and boast of their masculine beauty to a Nanny who pretended she had not noticed.

In fact, as the weeks went on, Nanny noticed quite a few disturbing things about the baby.

For one thing, Nanny tried to remove the baby’s bandages, but Elphaba seemed intent on biting her own hands off, and the teeth inside that pretty, thin-lipped mouth were indeed monstrous. She would bite a hole through the basket if she were left unfettered. She went after her own shoulder and scraped it raw. She looked as if she were strangling.

“Can’t a barber be had to pull the teeth out?” Nanny asked. “At least until the baby learns some self-control?”

“You’re out of your mind,” Melena said. “It will be all over the valley that the little marrow is green. We’ll keep the jaw strapped up until we solve the skin problem.”

“However in the world did her skin come green?” Nanny wondered, stupidly, for Melena blanched and Frex reddened, and the baby held her breath as if trying to turn blue to please them all. Nanny had to slap her to make her breathe again.

Nanny interviewed Frex out in the yard. After the double blow of the birth and his public embarrassment, he was not yet up to professional engagements and sat whittling praying beads out of oak, scoring and inscribing them with emblems of the Namelessness of God. Nanny set Elphaba down inside-she had an unreasonable fear of being overheard by this infant, and, worse, of being understood-and Nanny sat scooping out a pumpkin for supper.

“I don’t suppose, Frex, that you have green in your family background,” she began, knowing full well that Melena’s powerful grandfather would have confirmed such a predisposition before agreeing to let his granddaughter marry a unionist minister-of all the chances she had!

“Our family isn’t about money or about earthly power,” said Frex, taking no offense for once. “But I’m descended in a direct line from six ministers before me, father to son. We’re as well regarded in spiritual circles as Melena’s family is in parlors and at the court of Ozma. And no, there is no green, anywhere. I never heard of such a thing before in any family.”

Nanny nodded and said, “Well all right, I was only asking. I know you’re gooden than goblin martyrs.”

“But,” Frex said humbly, “Nanny, I think I caused this thing to happen. My tongue slipped on the day of the birthday-I announced that the devil was coming. I meant the Clock of the Time Dragon. But suppose those words unlocked room for the devil?

“The child is no devil!” snapped Nanny. She’s no angel either, she thought, but kept it to herself.

“On the other hand,” Frex continued, sounding more secure, “she may have been cursed by Melena, accidentally, who took my remark the wrong way and wept about it. Maybe Melena opened up inside herself a window through which an unattached sprite entered and colored the child.”

“On the very day she is to be born?” said Nanny. “That’s a capable sprite. Is your goodness so exalted you attract the truly high-powered among the Spirits of Aberration?”

Frex shrugged. A few weeks earlier he would have nodded, but his confidence was shattered with his abject failure in Rush Margins. He did not dare suggest what he feared: The child’s abnormality was a punishment for his failure to protect his flock from the pleasure faith.

“Well Nanny asked practically, “if through a curse the goods were damaged, then through what might the ill be overturned?”

“An exorcism,” said Frex.

“Are you empowered?”

“If I’m successful at changing her, we’ll know that I’m empowered,” said Frex. But now that he had a goal, his spirits brightened. He would spend some days in fasting, rehearsing prayers, and collecting supplies for the arcane ritual.

When he was off in the woods, and Elphaba napping, Nanny perched on the side of Melena’s hard marriage mattress.

“Frex wonders if his prediction that the devil was coming caused a window in you to open, letting an imp pass through to spoil the baby,” said Nanny. She was crocheting an edge of lace, clumsily; she had never excelled at piecework, but she liked handling the polished ivory crochet hook. “I wonder if you opened another window?”

Melena, groggy from pinlobble leaves as usual, arched an eyebrow in confusion.

“Did you sleep with someone other than Frex?” Nanny asked.

“Don’t be mad!” said Melena.

“I know you, honey,” said Nanny. “I’m not saying you’re not a good wife. But when you had the boys buzzing around you in your parents’ orchard you changed your perfumed undergarments more than once a day. You were lusty and sneaky and good at it. I’m not looking down at you. But don’t pretend to me that your appetites weren’t healthy.”

Melena buried her face in the pillow. “Oh for those days!” she wailed. “It’s not that I don’t love Frex! But I hate being better than the local peasant idiots!”

“Well, now this green child brings you down to their level, you ought to be pleased,” said Nanny meanly.

“Nanny, I love Frex. But he leaves me alone so often! I would kill for some tinker to pass by and sell me more than a tin coffeepot! I would pay well for someone less godly and more imaginative!”

“That’s a question for the future,” said Nanny sensibly. “I’m asking you about the past. The recent past. Since your marriage.”

But Melena’s face was vague and blurry. She nodded, she shrugged, she rocked her head.

“The obvious theory is an elf,” said Nanny.

“I wouldn’t have sex with an elf!” Melena shrieked.

“No more would I,” said Nanny, “but the green does give one pause. Are there elves in the neighborhood?”

“There’s a gaggle of them, tree elves, up over the hill someplace, but if possible they are more moronic than the fair citizens of Rush Margins. Really, Nanny, I’ve never even seen one, or only from a distance. The idea is repulsive. Elves giggle at everything, do you know that? One of them falls out of an oak and smashes his skull like a rotten turnip, and they gather and giggle and then forget about him. It’s insulting of you even to bring it up.”

“Get used to it, if we don’t find a way out of this quagmire.”

“Well, the answer is no.”

“Then someone else. Someone handsome enough on the outside, but carrying a germ that maybe you caught.”

Melena looked shocked. She hadn’t thought of her own health since Elphaba was born. Could she be at risk?

“The truth,” said Nanny. “We must know.”

“The truth,” said Melena distantly. “Well, it is unknowable.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I don’t know the answer to your question.” And Melena explained. Yes, the cottage was off the beaten track, and of course she never passed more than the curtest greetings with local farmers and fishermen and thickheads. But more travelers took to the hills and woods than you would credit. Often she had sat, listless and lonely, while Frex was off preaching, and she had found comfort in giving passersby a simple meal and a buoyant conversation.

“And more?”

But on those boring days, Melena muttered, she had taken to chewing pinlobble leaves. When she would awake, because the sun was setting or Frex was there frowning or grinning at her, she remembered little.

“You mean you indulged in adultery and you don’t even have the benefit of a good saucy memory about it?” Nanny was scandalized.

“I don’t know that I did!” said Melena. “I wouldn’t choose to, I mean not if I was thinking clearly. But I remember once when a tinker with a funny accent gave me a draft of some heady brew from a green glass bottle. And I had rare expansive dreams, Nanny, of the Other World-cities of glass and smoke-noise and color-I tried to remember.”

“So you could well have been raped by elves. Won’t your grandfather be pleased to learn how Frex is taking care of you.”

“Stop!” cried Melena.

“Well, I don’t know what’s to be done!” Nanny lost her temper at last. “Everyone’s being irresponsible! If you can’t remember whether your marriage vows have been broken or not, there’s not much good in acting like an offended saint.”

“We can always drown the baby and start over.”

“Just try drowning that thing,” muttered Nanny. “I pity the poor lake asked to take her in.”

Later, Nanny went through Melena’s small collection of medicines-herbs, drops, roots, brandies, leaves. She was wondering, without much hope, if she could invent something that might cause the girl’s skin to blanch. In the back of the chest Nanny found the green glass bottle spoken of by Melena. The light was bad and her eyes weren’t strong, but she

could make out the words MIRACLE ELIXIR on a piece of paper pasted to the front.

Though she had a native skill in healing, Nanny was unable to come up with a skin-changing potion. Bathing the child in cow’s milk didn’t make the skin white, either. But the child would not allow herself to be lowered into a pail of lake water; she twisted like a cat in panic. Nanny kept on with the cow’s milk. It left a horrid sour stink if she did not rub it off thoroughly with a cloth.

Frex organized an exorcism. It involved candles and hymns. Nanny watched from a distance. The man was beady-eyed, perspiring with effort even though the mornings were colder and colder. Elphaba slept in her binding cloth in the middle of the carpet, oblivious to the sacrament.

Nothing happened. Frex fell, exhausted and spent, and cradled his green daughter within the crook of his arm, as if finally embracing the proof of some undisclosed sin. Melena’s face hardened.

There was only one thing left to try. Nanny gathered the courage to bring it up on the day she was to leave back for Colwen Grounds.

“We see that peasant treatments don’t work,” said Nanny, “and spiritual intercession has failed. Do you have the courage to think about sorcery? Is there someone local who could magic the green venom out of the child?”

Frex was up and lashing out at Nanny, swinging his fists. Nanny fell backward off her stool, and Melena bobbed about her, shrieking. “How dare you!” cried Frex. “In this household! Isn’t this green girl insult enough? Sorcery is the refuge of the amoral; when it isn’t out-and-out charlatanism, it is dangerously evil! Contracts with the demons!”

Nanny said, “Oooh, preserve me! You fine, fine man, don’t you know enough to fight fire with fire?”

“Nanny, enough,” said Melena.

“Hitting a feeble old woman,” said Nanny, hurt. “Who only tries to help.”

The next morning Nanny packed her valise. There was nothing more that she could do, and she wasn’t willing to live the rest of her life with a fanatical hermit and a ruined baby, even for the sake of Melena.

Frex drove Nanny back to the inn at Stonespar End, for the coachand-four to take her home. Nanny knew Melena might still think about

killing the child, but somehow she doubted it. Nanny held her valise to her ample bosom, fearing bandits again. Inside her valise was hidden her gold garter (she could always claim it had been planted there without her knowledge, whereas it would have been hard to claim it had been planted on her leg in the same circumstances). She also had squirreled away the ivory crochet hook, three of Frex’s prayer beads because she liked the carvings, and the pretty green glass bottle left behind by some itinerant salesman selling, apparently, dreams and passion and somnolence.

She didn’t know what she thought. Was Elphaba devil’s spawn? Was she half-elf? Was she punishment for her father’s failure as a preacher, or for her mother’s sloppy morals and bad memory? Or was she merely a physical ailment, a blight like a misshapen apple or a five-legged calf? Nanny knew her worldview was foggy and chaotic, pestered by demons, faith, and folk science. It didn’t escape her attention, however, that both Melena and Frex had believed uncompromisingly that they would have a boy. Frex was the seventh son of a seventh son, and to add to that powerful equation he was descended from six ministers in a row. VVhatever child of either (or any) sex could dare follow in so auspicious a line?

Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.

For one short, wet month, early in the next year, the drought lifted. Spring tipped in like green well water, frothing at the hedges, bubbling at the roadside, splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of ivy and stringflower. Melena went about the yard in a state of mild undress, so that she could feel the sun on her pale skin and the deep warmth she had missed all winter. Strapped in her chair in the doorway, Elphaba, now a year and a half old, hit her breakfast minnow with the bowl of her spoon. “Oh, eat the thing, don’t mash it,” said Melena, but mildly. Since the child’s chin-sling had been removed, mother and daughter had begun to pay some attention to each other. To her surprise, Melena sometimes found Elphaba endearing, the way a baby should be.

This view was the only thing she had seen since leaving the elegant mansion of her family, the only thing she would ever gaze upon again- the windswept surface of Illswater, the distant dark stone cottages and chimneys of Rush Margins on the other side, the hills lying in a torpor beyond. She would go mad; the world was nothing but water and want. If a frolic of elves scampered through the yard she would leap on them for company, for sex, for murder.

“You father is a fraud,” she said to Elphaba. “Off finding himself all winter, leaving me with only you for company. Eat that breakfast, for you’ll get no more if you throw it on the ground.”

Elphaba picked up the fish and threw it on the ground.

“Your father is a charlatan,” continued Melena. “He used to be very good in bed for a religious man, and this is how I know his secret. Holy men are supposed to be above earthly pleasures, but your father enjoyed his midnight wrestling. Once upon a time! We must never tell him we know he’s a humbug, it would break his heart. We don’t want

to break his heart, do we?” And then Melena burst into a high peal of laughter.

Elphaba’s face was unsmiling, unchanging. She pointed to the fish.

“Breakfast. Breakfast in the dirt. Breakfast for the bugs,” Melena said. She dropped the collar of her spring robe a little lower and the pink yoke of her bare shoulders gyrated. “Shall we go walk by the edge of the lake today and maybe you’ll drown?”

But Elphaba would never drown, never, because she would not go near the lake.

“Maybe we’ll go out in a boat and tip over!” Melena shrieked.

Elphaba cocked her head to one side as if listening for some part of her mother not intoxicated with leaves and wine.

The sun swept out from behind a cloud. Elphaba scowled. Melena’s robe dropped lower. Her breasts worked their way out from between the dirty ruffles of the collar.

Look at me, thought Melena, showing my breasts to the child I couldn’t give milk to for fear of amputation. I who was the rose of Nest Hardings, I who was the beauty of my generation! And now I am reduced to company I don’t even want, my own squirming thorny little girl. She is more grasshopper than girl, with those angular little thighs, those arching eyebrows, those poking fingers. She’s about the business of learning like any child, but she takes no delight in the world: She pushes and breaks and nibbles on things without any pleasure. As if she has a mission to taste and measure all the disappointments of life. In which Rush Margins is amply supplied. Mercy from the Unnamed God, she’s a creep, she is. She is.

“Or we might take a walk in the woods today and pick the last of the winter berries.” Melena was full of guilt at her lack of motherly feeling. “We can put them in a pie. Can we put them in a pie? Shall we, honey?”

Elphaba didn’t speak yet, but she nodded, and began to wiggle to get down. Melena started a clapping game Elphaba took no notice of. The child grunted and pointed to the ground, and arched her long elegant legs to illustrate her desire. Then she gestured to the gate leading from the kitchen garden and the hen yard.

There was a man at the uprights of the gate, leaning, shy and hungry-looking, with skin the color of roses at twilight: a dusky, shadowy red. He had a couple of leather satchels on his shoulders and back, and a

walking staff, and a dangerously handsome, hollow-looking face. Melena screeched and caught herself, directed her voice to a lower register. It had been so long since she had spoken to anyone but a whining toddler. “Good glory, you startled us!” she cried. “Are you searching for some breakfast?” She had lost the social touch. For instance, her breasts should not be staring at him so. Yet she did not clasp her gown.

“Please to forgive a sudden appearance by a strange foreigner at Lady’s gate,” said the man.

“Forgiven, of course,” she said impatiently. “Come in where I can see you-come in, come in!”

Elphaba had seen so few other people in her life that she hid one eye behind her spoon, and peeked with the other eye.

The man approached. His movements showed the clumsiness of exhaustion. He was large of ankle and thick of foot, slender about the waist and shoulders, and thick again in the neck-as if he had been made on a lathe, and worked too briefly at the extremities. His hands, letting down the satchels, seemed like beasts with minds of their own. They were outsized and splendid.

“Traveler not to know where he is,” said the man. “Two nights to cross the hills from Downhill Comings. To look for the inn at Three Dead Trees. To rest.”

“You’re lost, you’ve veered,” said Melena, deciding not to be perplexed at his scrambled words. “No matter. Let me fix you a meal and you can tell me your story.” Her hands were at her hair, which once used to be thought precious as spun brass. At least it was clean.

The man was sleek and fit. When he removed his cap his hair fell out in greasy hanks, sunset red. He washed at the pump, stripping off his shirt, and Melena noticed it was nice to see a waist on a man again (Frex, bless him, had run to plumpness in the year-and-some since Elphaba’s birth). Were all Quadlings this delicious dusty rose color? The man’s name, Melena learned, was Turtle Heart, and he was a glassblower from Owels, in little-known Quadling Country.

She bundled up her breasts at last, reluctantly. Elphaba squawked to be let loose, and without so much as flinching the visitor unbuckled her and swept her in the air and caught her again. The child crowed with surprise, even delight, and Turtle Heart repeated the trick. Melena took advantage of his concentration on the brat to scoop up the uneaten minnow from the dirt and rinse it off. She plopped it among the eggs and mashed tar root, hoping that Elphaba would not suddenly learn to speak and embarrass her. It would be just like the child to do that.

But Elphaba was too charmed by this man to fuss or complain. She didn’t even whine when Turtle Heart finally came to the bench and sat to eat. She crawled between his sleek, hairless calves (for he had shucked off his leggings) and she moaned some private tune with a satisfied smirk on her face. Melena found herself jealous of a female not yet two years old. She wouldn’t have minded sitting on the ground between Turtle Heart’s legs.

“I’ve never met a Quadling before,” she said, too loudly, too brightly. The months of solitude had made hem forget hem manners. “My family would never have Quadlings in to dine-not that there were many, or even any for all I know, in the farmlands around my family’s estate. The stories make out that Quadlings were sneaky and incapable of telling the truth.”

“How can a Quadling to answer such a charge if a Quadling is given always to lie?” He smiled at her.

She melted like butter on warm bread. “I’ll believe anything you say.” He told her of the life in the outreaches of Ovvels, the houses rotting gently into the swamp, the harvest of snails and murkweed, the customs of communal living and ancestor worship. “So you believe your ancestors are with you?” she prodded. “I don’t mean to be nosy but I’ve become interested in religion despite myself.”

“Does Lady to believe ancestors are with her?”

She could hardly focus on the question, so bright were his eyes, and so wonderful it was to be called Lady. Her shoulders straightened. “My immediate ancestors couldn’t be farther away,” she admitted. “I mean my parents- they’re still living, but so uninteresting to me they might as well be dead.”

“When dead they may to visit Lady often.”

“They are not welcome. Go away.” She laughed, shooing. “You mean ghosts? They’d better not. That’s what I’d call the worst of both worlds-if there is an Other Land.”

“There is an otherworld,” he said with certainty.

She felt chilled. She scooped Elphaba up and hugged her tightly. Elphaba sagged as if boneless in her arms, neither fussing nor returning the hug, just falling limp from the novelty of being touched. “Are you a seer?” said Melena.

“Turtle Heart to blow glass,” he said. He seemed to mean that as an answer.

Melena was suddenly reminded of the dreams she used to have, of exotic places she knew she was too dull to invent. “Married to a minister, and I don’t know that I believe in an otherworld,” she admitted. She hadn’t meant to say that she was married, although she supposed the child implicated her.

But Turtle Heart had finished talking. He put down his plate (he had left the minnow) and he took from his satchels a small pot, a pipe, and some sacks of sand and soda ash and lime and other minerals. “Might Turtle Heart to thank Lady for her welcome?” he asked; she nodded.

He built up the kitchen fire and sorted and mixed his ingredients, and arranged utensils, and cleaned the bowl of his pipe with a special rag folded in its own pouch. Elphaba sat clumplike, her green hands on her green toes, curiosity on her sharp pinched face.

Melena had never seen glass blown, just as she had never seen paper made, cloth woven, or logs hewn from tree trunks. It seemed as marvelous to her as the local stories of the traveling clock that had hexed her husband into the professional paralysis from which he still hadn’t quite escaped-though he tried.

Turtle Heart hummed a note through his nose or the pipe as he blew an irregular bulb of hot greenish ice. It steamed and hissed in the air. He knew what to do with it; he was a wizard of glass; Melena had to hold Elphaba back to keep her from burning her hands as she reached for it.

In what seemed like no time at all, in what felt like magic, the glass had gone from being semiliquid and abstract to a hardening, cooling reality.

It was a smooth, impure circle, like a slightly oblong plate. All the while Turtle Heart worked with it, Melena thought of her own character, going from youthful ether to hardening shell, transparently empty. Breakable, too. But before she could lose herself in remorse, Turtle Heart took her two hands and passed them near, but not touching, the flat surface of the glass.

“Lady to talk with ancestors,” he said. But she would not struggle to connect with old boring dead people in the Other Land, not when his huge hands covered hers. She breathed through her nose to suppress the smell of breakfast in an unwashed mouth (fruit and one glass of wine, or was it two?). She thought she might well faint.

“Look in glass,” he urged her. She could only look at his neck and his raspberry-honey-colored chin.

He looked for her. Elphaba came and steadied herself with a small hand on his knee and peered in, too.

“Husband Is near,” said Turtle Heart. Was this prophecy through a glass dish or was he asking her a question? But he went on: “Husband is traveling on a donkey and to bring elderly woman to visit you. Is ancestor to visit?”

“Is old nursemaid, probably,” Melena said. She was sloping downward into his crippled syntax, in unabashed sympathy. “Can you really to see that in there?”

He nodded. Elphaba nodded too, but at what?

“How much time do we have before he gets here?” she asked.

“Till this evening.”

They did not speak another word until sunset. They banked the fire and hooked Elphaba to a harness, and sat her down in front of the cooling glass, which they hung on a string like a lens or a mirror. It seemed to mesmerize and calm her; she did not even gnaw absentmindedly at her wrists or toes. They left the door to the cottage open so that, from time to time, they could peer out from the bed to check on the child who, in the glare of a sunny day, would not be able to focus her eyes to see in the house shadows, and who anyway never turned to look. Turtle Heart was unbearably beautiful. Melena dragon-snaked with him, covered him with her mouth, poured him in her hands, heated and cooled and shaped his luminosity. He filled her emptiness.

They were washed, and dressed, with supper mostly made, when the donkey brayed a half mile down the lake. Melena blushed. Turtle Heart was back at the pipe, blowing again. Elphaba turned and looked in the direction of the donkey’s serrated statement. Her lips, which always looked almost black against the new-apple color of her skin, twisted tight, chewed against each other. She bit her lower lip as if thinking, but she did not bleed; she had learned to manage the teeth somewhat, through trial and error. She put her hand on the shining disc. The glass circlet caught the last blue of the sky, until it looked like a magic mirror showing nothing but silver-cold water within.

All the way from Stonespar End, where Frex met her coach, Nanny complained. Lumbago, weak kidneys, fallen arches, aching gums, sore haunches. Frex wanted to say, And how about your swollen ego? Though he had been out of circulation for a while, he knew such a remark would be rude. Nanny flounced and petted herself, clinging determinedly to her seat until they arrived at the lodge near Rush Margins.

Melena greeted Frex with affecting shyness. “My breastplate, my backbone,” she murmured. She was slender after a hard winter, her cheekbones more prominent. Her skin looked scoured as if by an artist’s scratch brush-but she had always had the look of an etching-in-the-flesh. She was usually bold with her kisses and he found her reticence alarming until he realized there was a stranger in the shadows. Then, after introductions, Nanny and Melena fussed to get a meal on the table, and Frex put out some oats for the sorry nag who had to pull the carriage. When this was done he went to sit in the spring evening light and to meet his daughter again.

Elphaba was cautious around him. He found in his pouch a trinket he’d whittled for her, a little sparrow with a cunning beak and upraised wings. “Look, Fabala,” he whispered (Melena hated the derivative, so he used it: it was his and Elphaba’s private bond, the father-daughter pact against the world). “Look what I found in the forest. A little maplewood bird.”

The child took the thing in her hands. She touched it softly, and put its head in her mouth. Frex steeled himself to hear the inevitable splintering, and to hold back his sigh of disappointment. But Elphaba did not bite. She sucked the head and looked at it again. Wet, it had greater life.

“You like it,” Frex said.

She nodded, and began to feel its wings. Now that she was distracted, Frex could draw her between his knees. He nuzzled his crinkly-bearded chin into her hair she smelled like soap and wood smoke, and the char on toast, a good healthy smell-and he closed his eyes. It was good to be home.

He had spent the winter in an abandoned shepherd’s hut on the windward slope of Griffon’s Head. Praying and fasting, moving deeper inside and then further outside himself. And why not? At home, he had felt the scorn of the people of the whole claustrophobic valley of Illswater; they had connected the Time Dragon’s slanderous story of a corrupt minister with the arrival of a deformed child. They had drawn their own conclusions. They avoided his chapel services. So a sort of hermit’s life, at least in small intervals, had seemed both penance and preparation for something else, something next-but what?

He knew this life wasn’t what Melena had originally expected, mar-tying him. With his bloodlines, Frex had looked primed for an elevation to proctor or even, eventually, bishop. He had imagined the happiness Melena would have as a society dame, presiding over feast day dinners and charity balls and episcopal teas. Instead-he could see her in the firelight, grating a last, limp winter carrot onto a pan of fish-here she wasted away, a partner in a difficult marriage on a cold, shadowy lakeshore. Frex had a notion that she wasn’t sorry to see him go off from time to time, so that she could be glad to see him come back.

As he ruminated, his beard tickled Elphaba’s neck, and she snapped the wings off her wooden sparrow. She sucked on it like a whistle. Twisting away from him, she ran to a glass lens hanging from the projecting cave, and swatted at it.

“Don’t, you’ll break that!” said her father.

“She cannot to break that.” The traveler, the Quadling, came from the sink where he had been washing up.

“She just turned her toy into a cripple,” Frex said, pointing at the ruined bridling.

“She is herself pleased at the half things,” Turtle Heart said. “I think. The little girl to play with the broken pieces better.”

Frex didn’t quite get it, but nodded. He knew that months away from the human voice made him clumsy at first. The boy from the inn,

who had climbed Griffon’s Head to deliver Nanny’s request to be picked up at Stonespar End, had obviously thought Frex a wild man, grunting and unkempt. Frex had had to quote a little of the Ozlad to indicate some sort of humanity-“Land of green abandon, land of endless leaf”-it was all that would come to him.

“Why can’t she break it?” asked Frex.

“Because I do not to make it to be broken,” answered Turtle Heart. But he smiled at Frex, not aggressively. And Elphaba wandered around with the shiny glass as if it were a toy, catching shadows, reflections, lights on its imperfect surface, almost as if she were playing.

“Where are you going?” asked Frex, just as Turtle Heart was saying, “Where are you from?”

“I’m a Munchkinlander,” said Frex.

“I to think all Munchkins to be shorter than I or you.”

“The peasants, the farmers, yes,” Frex said, “but anyone with bloodlines worth tracing married into height somewhere along the way. And you? You’re from Quadling Country.”

“Yes,” said the Quadling. His reddish hair had been washed and was drying into an airy nimbus. Frex was glad to see Melena so generous as to offer a passerby water to bathe in. Perhaps she was adjusting to country life after all. Because, mercy, a Quadling ranked about as low on the social ladder as it was possible to get and still be human.

“But I to understand,” said the Quadling. “Ovvels is a small world. Until I to leave, I am not to know of hills, one beyond the other and from the spiny backbones a world so wide around. The blurry far away to hurt my eyes, for I cannot to make it seen. Please sir to describe the world you know.”

Frex picked up a stick In the soil he drew an egg on its side. “What they taught me in lessons,” he said. “Inside the circle is Oz. Make an

he did so, through the oval-“and roughly speaking, you have a pie in four sections. The top Is Gillikin Full of cities and universities and theatres, civilized life, they say. And industry.” He moved clockwise. “East, is Munchkinland, where we are now. Farmland, the bread basket of Oz, except down in the mountainous south-these strokes, in the district of Wend Hardings, are the hills you’re climbing.” He bumped and squiggled. “Directly south of the center of Oz is Quadling Country. Badlands, I’m

told–marshy, useless, infested with bugs and feverish airs.” Turtle Heart looked puzzled at this, but nodded. “Then west, what they call Winkie Country. Don’t know much about that except it’s dry and unpopulated.”

“And around?” said Turtle Heart.

“Sandstone deserts north and west, fleckstone desert east and south. They used to say the desert sands were deadly poison; that’s just standard propaganda. Keeps invaders from Ev and Quox from trying to get in. Munchkinland is rich and desirable farming territory, and Gillikin’s not bad either. In the Glikkus, up here”-he scratched lines in the northeast, on the border between Gillikin and Munchkinland-“are the emerald mines and the famous Glikkus canals. I gather there’s a dispute whether the Glikkus is Munchkinlander or Gillikinese, but I have no opinion on that.”

Turtle Heart moved his hands over the drawing in the dirt, flexing his palms, as if he were reading the map from above. “But here?” he said. “What is here?”

Frex wondered if he meant the air above Oz. “The realm of the Unnamed God?” he said. “The Other Land? Are you a unionist?”

“Turtle Heart is glassblower,” said Turtle Heart.

“I mean religiously.”

Turtle Heart bowed his head and didn’t meet Frex’s eye. “Turtle Heart is not to know what name to call this.”

“I don’t know about Quadlings,” said Frex, warming to a possible convert. “But Gillikinese and Munchkinlanders are largely unionist. Since Lurlinist paganism went out. For centuries, there have been unionist shrines and chapels all over Oz. Are there none in Quadling Country?”

“Turtle Heart does not to recognize what is this,” he said.

“And now respectable unionists are going in droves over to the pleasure faith,” said Frex, snorting, “or even tiktokism, which hardly even qualifies as a religion. To the ignorant everything is spectacle these days. The ancient unionist monks and aunts knew their place in the universe-acknowledging the life source too sublime to be named-and now we sniff up the skirts of every musty magician who comes along. Hedonists, anarchists, solipsists! Individual freedom and amusement is all! As if sorcery had any moral component! Charms, alley magic, industrial-strength sound and light displays, fake shape-changers! Charlatans, nabobs of necromancy, chemical and herbal wisdoms, humbug hedonists!

Selling their bog recipes and crone aphorisms and schoolboy spells! It makes me sick.”

Turtle Heart said, “Shall Turtle Heart to bring you water, shall Turtle Heart to lie you down?” He put fingers soft as calfskin on the side of Frex’s neck. Frex shivered and realized he had been shouting. Nanny and Melena were standing in the doorway with the pan of fish, silent.

“It’s a figure of speech, I’m not sick,” he said, but he was touched at the concern the foreigner had shown. “I think we’ll eat.”

And they did. Elphaba ignored her food except to prod the eyes out of the baked fish and to try to fit them onto her wingless bird. Nanny grumbled good-naturedly about the wind off the lake, her chills, her backbone, her digestion. Her gas was apparent from more than a few feet away and Frex moved, as discreetly as possible, to be upwind. He found himself sitting next to the Quadling on the bench.

“So is all that clear to you?” Frex pointed a fork at the map of Oz.

“Is Emerald City to be where?” said the Quadling, fish bones poking out from between his lips.

“Dead center,” Frex said.

“And there is Ozma,” said Turtle Heart.

“Ozma, the ordained Queen of Oz, or so they say,” Frex said, “though the Unnamed God must be ruler of all, in our hearts.”

“How can unnamed creature to rule-” began Turtle Heart.

“No theology at dinner,” sang out Melena, “that’s a house rule dating from the start of our marriage, Turtle Heart, and we obey it.”

“Besides, I still harbor a devotion to Lurline.” Nanny made a face in Frex’s direction. “Old folks like me are allowed to. Do you know about Lurline, stranger?”

Turtle Heart shook his head.

“If we have no theology then we surely have no arrant pagan nonsense-” began Frex, but Nanny, being a guest and invoking a touch of deafness when it suited her, plowed on.

“Lurline is the Fairy Queen who flew over the sandy wastes, and spotted the green and lovely land of Oz below. She left her daughter Ozma to rule the country in her absence and she promised to return to Oz in its darkest hour.”

“Hah!” said Frex.

“No hahs at me.” Nanny sniffed. “I’m as entitled to my beliefs as you are, Frexspar the Godly. At least they don’t get me into trouble as yours do.”

“Nanny, govern your temper,” said Melena, enjoying this.

“It’s rubbish,” said Frex. “Ozma rules in the Emerald City, and anyone who’s seen her, or paintings of her, knows that she’s from Gillikinese stock. She’s got the same broad band of forehead, the slightly gapped front teeth, the frenzy of curling blond hair, the quick shifts of mood- usually into anger. All characteristic of Gillikinese peoples. You’ve seen her, Melena, tell him.”

“Oh, she is elegant in her way,” Melena admitted.

“The daughter of a Fairy Queen?” said Turtle Heart.

“More nonsense,” said Frex.

“Not nonsense!” snapped Nanny.

“They think she bears herself again and again like a phoenix,” said Frex. “Hah and double hah. There’ve been three hundred years of very different Ozmas. Ozma the Mendacious was a dedicated aunt, who lowered rulings in a bucket down from the topmost chamber in a cloister tower. She was as mad as a bung beetle. Ozma the Warrior conquered the Glikkus, at least for a time, and commandeered the emeralds with which to decorate the Emerald City. Ozma the librarian did nothing but read genealogies for her whole life long. Then there was Ozma the Scarcely Beloved, who kept pet ermines. She overtaxed the farmers to begin the road system of yellow brick that they’re still struggling to complete, and much luck to them, I say.”

“Who is Ozma now?” asked Turtle Heart.

“Actually,” said Melena, “I had the pleasure to meet the last Ozma at a social season in the Emerald City-my grandfather the Eminent Thropp had a town house. The winter I was fifteen I was brought out into society there. She was Ozma the Bilious, because of a bad stomach. She was the size of a lake narwhal, but she dressed beautifully. I saw her with her husband, Pastorius, at the Oz Festival of Song and Sentiment.”

“She is no longer the Queen?” asked Turtle Heart, confused.

“She died in an unfortunate accident involving some rat poison,” said Frex.

“Died,” said Nanny, “or her spirit moved next into her child, Ozma Tippetarius.”

“The current Ozma is just about the age of Elphaba,” said Melena, “so her father, Pastorius, is the Ozma Regent. The good man will rule until Ozma Tippetarius is old enough to take the throne.”

Turtle Heart shook his head. Frex was annoyed because they had spent so much time talking about the worldly ruler and ignored the eternal realm, and Nanny lapsed into a bout of indigestion for which they all were very sorry, olfactorily speaking.

Anyway, even being irritated, Frex was glad to be home. Because of the beauty of Melena-she was almost glowing tonight as the sun left the sky-and because of the surprise of Turtle Heart, smiling and un-self-conscious next to him. Maybe because of Turtle Heart’s religious emptiness, which Frex found challenging and appealing, almost tempting.

“Then there’s the dragon beneath Oz, in a hidden cavern,” Nanny was saying to Turtle Heart. “The dragon who has dreamt the world, and who will burn it in flames when he awakes-“

“Shut up that superstitious codswallop!” shouted Frex.

Elphaba, on all fours, advanced on the uneven planks of the flooring. She bared her teeth-as if she knew what a dragon was, as if she were pretending-and roared. Her green skin made her more persuasive, as if she were a dragon child. She roared again-“Oh sweetheart, don’t,” said Frex-and she peed on the floor, and sniffed her urine with satisfaction and disgust.

One afternoon toward the end of summer, Nanny said, “There’s a beast abroad. I’ve seen it at dusk several times, lurking about in the ferns. What sorts of creatures are native to these hills anyway?”

“You don’t find anything larger than a gopher,” said Melena. They were at the side of the brook, working at laundry. The small spring wetness had long since ceased, and the drought had clamped its hand down again. The stream was only a thin trickle. Elphaba, who would not come near the water, was stripping a wild pear tree of its stunted crop. She clung to the trunk with her hands and out-turned feet, and threw her head around, catching the sour fruit with her teeth and then spitting seeds and stem on the ground.

“This is larger than a gopher,” said Nanny. “Trust me. Have you bears? It could have been a bear cub, though it moved mighty fast.”

“No bears. There’s the rumor of rock tigers on the felltop, but they tell me not a single one has been sighted in ages. And rock tigers are notoriously skittish and shy. They don’t come near human dwellings.”

“A wolf then? Are there wolves?” Nanny let the sheet droop in the water. “It could have been a wolf.”

“Nanny, you think you’re in the desert. Wend Hardings is desolate, I agree, but it’s a tame barrenness for all that. You’re alarming me with your wolf and your tiger talk.”

Elphaba, who would not speak yet, made a low growl in the pocket of her throat.

“I don’t like it,” said Nanny. “Let’s finish up and dry these things back at the house. Enough is enough. Besides, I have other things I want to say to you. Let’s give the child to Turtle Heart and let’s go off somewhere.” She shuddered. “Somewhere safe.”

“What you have to say you can say within earshot of Elphaba,” said Melena. “You know she doesn’t understand a word.”

“You confuse not speaking with not listening,” said Nanny. “I think she understands plenty.”

“Look, she’s smearing fruit on her neck, like a cologne-“

“Like a war paint, you mean.”

“Oh, dour Nanny, stop being such a goose and scrub those sheets harder. They’re filthy.”

“I need hardly ask whose sweat and leakage this is .

“Oh you, no you needn’t ask, but don’t start moralizing at me-“

“But you know Frex is bound to notice sooner or later. These energetic afternoon naps you take-well, you always had an eye for the fellow with a decent helping of sausage and hard-boiled eggs-“

“Nanny, come, this is none of your affair.”

“More’s the pity,” said Nanny, sighing. “Isn’t aging a cruel hoax? I’d trade my hard-won pearls of wisdom for a good romp with Uncle Flagpole any day.”

Melena flipped a handful of water in Nanny’s face to shut her up. The older woman blinked and she said, “Well, it’s your garden, plant there what you choose and reap what you may. What I want to talk about is the child, anyway.”

The girl was now squatting behind the pear tree, eyes narrowed at something in the distance. She looked, thought Melena, like a sphinx, like a stone beast. A fly even landed on her face and walked across the bridge of her nose, and the child didn’t flinch or squirm. Then, suddenly, she leaped and pounced, a naked green kitten after an invisible butterfly.

“What about her?”

“Melena, she needs to get used to other children. She’ll start talking a little bit if she sees that other chicks are talking.”

“Talking among children is an overrated concept.”

“Don’t be glib. You know she needs to get used to people other than us. She’s not going to have an easy time of it anyhow, unless she sheds her greeny skin as she grows up. She needs the habits of conversation. Look, I give her chores to do, I warble nursery rhymes at her. Melena, why doesn’t she respond like other children?”

“She’s boring. Some children just are.”

“She ought to have other pups to play with. They would infect her with a sense of fun.”

“Frankly, Frex doesn’t expect a child of his to be interested in fun,” said Melena. “Fun is counted for overmuch in this world, Nanny. I agree with him on that.”

“So your dragon-snaking with Turtle Heart is what-devotional exercises?”

“I said don’t be catty, please!” Melena focused on the toweling, beating it with annoyance. Nanny would go on about this; she was up to something. And Nanny had hit the nail on the head. There crept Turtle Heart into the cool shadows of the cottage, when Melena was tired from a morning’s work in the vegetable garden. He covered her with a sense of holiness, and it was more than her undergarments that would drop away from her when they tumbled panting onto the bedclothes. She would lose her sense of shame.

She knew this did not follow conventional reason. Nevertheless, should a tribunal of unionist ministers call her to court for adultery, she would tell the truth. Somehow Turtle Heart had saved her and restored her sense of grace, of hope in the world. Her belief in the goodness of things had been dashed into bits when little green Elphaba crawled into being. The child was extravagant punishment for a sin so minor she didn’t even know if she had committed it.

It was not the sex that saved her, though the sex was mighty vigorous, even frightening. It was that Turtle Heart didn’t blush when Frex showed up, that he didn’t shrink from beastly little Elphaba. He set up shop in the side yard, blowing glass and grinding it, as if life had brought him here just to redeem Melena. Wherever else he might have been heading had been forgotten.

“Very well, you old interfering cow,” said Melena. “For the sake of argument, what do you propose?”

“We must take Elphie to Rush Margins and find some small children for her to play with.”

Melena sat back on her haunches. “But you have to be jesting!” she cried. “Slow and deliberate as Elphaba is, at least she’s unharmed here! I may not be able to summon much maternal warmth, but I feed her, Nanny, and I keep her from hurting herself! How cruel, to inflict the out-

side world on her! A green child will be an open invitation for scorn and abuse. And children are wickeder than adults, they have no sense of restraint. We might as well go throw her in the lake she’s so terrified of.”

“No no no,” said Nanny, putting her fat hands on her own knees; her voice was thick with determination. “Now I am going to argue with you about this, Melena, until you give in. Time in its wisdom will bring you around to my way of thinking. Listen to me. Listen to me. You are only a pampered little rich girl who flitted about from music lessons to dance lessons with neighborhood children equally rich and stupid as you. Of course there’s cruelty. But Elphaba must learn who she is and she must face down cruelty early. And there will be less of it than you expect.”

“Don’t play Nanny Goddess with me. I won’t have it.”

“Nanny is not giving up,” said Nanny, just as fiercely. “I have a long-range view of your happiness as well as hers, and believe me, if you don’t give her the weapons and armor with which she can defend herself against scorn, she’ll make your life miserable as hers will be miserable.”

“And the weapons and armor she’ll learn from the dirty urchins of Rush Margins?”

“Laughter. Fun. Teasing. Smiling.”

“Oh, please.”

“I’m not above blackmailing you about this, Melena said Nanny. “I can wander into Rush Margins this afternoon and find where Frex is trying to hold his revival meeting and whisper a few words to him. While Frex is busy cranking up the religious ardor of Rush Margins sluggards, would he be interested in knowing what his wife is up to with Turtle Heart?”

“You are a miserable old fiend! You are a foul, unethical bully!” cried Melena.

Nanny grinned with pride. “No later than tomorrow,” she said, “we’ll go in tomorrow and get her life started.”

In the morning a stiff, unforgiving wind galloped from the heights. It picked up old leaves and the remains of failed crops and kitchen gardens. Nanny pulled a shawl across her rounded shoulders and tugged a bonnet over her brow. Her eyes were full of marginal beasts; she kept turning to see a slinking cat-thing or a vixen dissolve into clots of skeleton leaves and debris.

Nanny found a blackthorn staff as if to aid her over stones and ruts, but she hoped to be ready to wield it against some hungry beast. “The land is dry and cold,” she observed, almost to herself. “And so little rain! Of course the big beasts would be driven from the hills. Let’s walk together, no running ahead, little green.”

They made their way in silence: Nanny fearful, Melena angry at having to miss her afternoon dalliance, and Elphaba like a windup toy, one foot solidly in front of the other. The margins of the lake had receded, and some of the crude docks were now walkways over pebble and drying greenrot, with the water pulled back beyond their reach.

Gawnette’s was a dark stone cottage with a roof of moldering thatch. Because of a bad hip, Gawnette was no good at hauling the fishing nets or at kneeling over the wasting vegetable gardens. She had a mess of small children in various stages of undress, squawling and sulking and trotting around the dirty yard in a little pack. She looked up as the minister’s family approached.

“Good day, and you must be Gawnette,” said Nanny brightly. She was pleased to open the gate and be safely inside the garden, even of this hovel. “Brother Frexspar told us we would find you here.”

“Sweet Lurline, what they say is true!” said Gawnette, making a holy sign against Elphaba. “I thought it vicious lies, and here she is!”

The children had slowed to a walk. They were boys and girls, brown-faced and white, all of them filthy, all of them keen on something new. Though they kept walking, playing some game of endurance or make-believe, their eyes never left Elphaba.

“You know this is Melena-of course you do-and I am their Nanny,” said Nanny. “We’re pleased to meet you, Gawnette.” She slid a glance at Melena and bit her upper lip and nodded.

“Very pleased, I’m sure,” said Melena stonily.

“And we need some advice, for you come well recommended,” said Nanny. “The little girl has problems, and the best of our thinking just doesn’t seem to bring forth any good ideas.”

Gawnette leaned forward, suspicious.

“The child is green,” whispered Nanny confidentially. “You may not have noticed, being attracted by her charm and warmth. Of course, we know the good people of Rush Margins wouldn’t let a thing like that

bother them. But because she is green, she is shy. Look at her. Little frightened spring turtle. We need to draw her out, make her happier, and we don’t know how.”

“She’s green all right,” said Gawnette. “No wonder useless Brother Frexspar retired from his preaching for so long!” She threw back her head and laughed raucously, unkindly. “And he’s only now had the nerve to take it up again! Well, that’s balls if ever I heard it!”

“Brother Frexspar,” interrupted Melena coldly, “reminds us of the scriptures-’No one knows the color of a soul.’ Gawnette, he suggested I remind you of that very text.”

“Did he now,” mumbled Gawnette, chastised. “Well then, what do you want with me?”

“Let her play, let her learn, let her come here and be minded by you. You know more than we do,” said Nanny.

The cunning old cow, thought Melena. She is trying that rarest of strategies, telling the truth, and making it sound plausible. They sat down.

“I don’t know if they’d take to her,” said Gawnette, holding out a while. “And you know my hip doesn’t let me hop up and stop them when they get going.”

“Let’s see. And of course there’d be some payment, some cash, Melena fully agrees,” said Nanny. The barren vegetable plot had caught her attention. This was poverty. Nanny gave Elphaba a push. “Well, go on in, child, and see what’s what.”

The girl didn’t budge, didn’t blink. The children came near to her. There were five boys and two girls. “What an ugly pug,” said one of the older boys. He touched Elphaba on the shoulder.

“Play nicely now,” said Melena, about to leap up, but Nanny kept her hand out to say, Stay down.

“Tag, let’s tag,” said the boy, “who’s the greenily?”

“Not it, not it!” The other children shrieked, and rushed in to

brush Elphaba with their hands, and then raced away. She stood for a

minute, unsure, her own hands down and clenched, and then she ran a

few steps, and stopped.

“That’s the way, healthful exercise,” said Nanny, nodding. “Gawnette, you’re a genius.”

“I know my chicks,” said Gawnette. “Don’t say I don’t.”

Herdlike, the children rushed in again, tapping and darting away, but the girl would not chase them. So they neared her once more.

“Is it true you got a Quadling muckfrog staying with you too?” said Gawnette. “Is it true he only eats grass and dung?”

“I beg your pardon!” cried Melena.

“That’s what they say, is it true?” said Gawnette.

“He’s a fine man.”

“But he’s a Quadling?”

“Nell-yes.”

“Don’t bring him around here then, they spread the plague,” said Gawnette.

“They spread no such thing,” snapped Melena.

“No throwing, Elphie dear,” called Nanny.

“I’m only saying what I hear. They say at night that Quadlings fall asleep and their souls climb out through their mouths and go abroad.”

“Stupid people say a lot of stupid things.” Melena was curt and too loud. “I have never seen his soul climb out of his mouth while he was sleeping, and I’ve had plenty of opportunity”

“Darling, no rocks,” shrilled Nanny. “None of the other children have rocks.”

“Now they do,” observed Gawnette.

“He is the most sensitive person I’ve ever met,” said Melena.

“Sensitive isn’t much use to a fishwife,” said Gawnette. “How about to a minister and a minister’s wife?”

“Now there’s blood, how vexing,” said Nanny. “Children, let Elphie up so I can wipe that cut. And I didn’t bring a rag. Gawnette?”

“Bleeding is good for them, makes them less hungry,” said Gawnette.

“I rate sensitive a good sight higher than stupid,” said Melena, seething.

“No biting,” said Gawnette to one of the little boys, and then, seeing Elphaba open her mouth to retaliate, raised herself to her feet, bad hip or no, and screamed, “no biting, for the love of mercy!”

“Aren’t children divine?” said Nanny.

Every

second or third day Nanny took Elphaba by the hand and waddled the shadowy road to Rush Margins. There Elphaba mingled with the greasy children under the eyes of sullen Gawnette. Frex had moved out again (was it confidence or desperation?)-he was scaring miserable hamlets with his frenzied beard and his collected opinions on faith. Gone for eight, ten days at a time. Melena practiced piano arpeggios on a tuneless mock keyboard Frex had carved for her, to perfect scale.

Turtle Heart seemed to wilt and parch as autumn came on. Their afternoons of dalliance began to lose the heat of urgency, and developed in warmth. Melena had always appreciated the attentions of Frex, and been attentive to him, but somehow his body had not been as supple as Turtle Heart’s. She drifted off to sleep with Turtle Heart’s mouth on one of her nipples and his hands-his big hands-roaming like sentient pets. She imagined that Turtle Heart divided his body when her eyes were closed; his mouth roamed, his cock rose and nudged and leaned, his breath was somewhere other than his mouth, hissing elegantly into her ear, wordlessly, his arms were like stirrups.

Still she didn’t know him, not the way she knew Frex; she could not see through him as she could most people. She put this down to his majestic bearing, but Nanny, ever watchful, remarked one evening that it was just that his ways were the ways of a Quadling and Melena had never even acknowledged that he came from a different culture than she did.

“Culture, what’s culture,” Melena said lazily. “People are people.”

“Don’t you remember your nursery rhymes?” Nanny put aside her sewing (with relief) and recited.

“Boys study, girls know,

That’s the way that lessons go.

Boys learn, girls forget,

That’s the way of lessons yet.

Gillikinese are sharp as knives,

Munchkinlanders lead corny lives,

Glikkuns beat their ugly wives,

Winkies swarm in sticky hives.

But the Quadlings, Oh the Quadlings,

Slimy stupid curse-at-godlings,

Eat their young and bury their old

A day before their bodies get cold.

Give me an apple and I’ll say it again.

- “What do you know of him?” Nanny asked. “Is he married? Why did he leave Lower Slimepit or wherever he comes from? Naturally, it’s not my place to ask such personal questions-“

“Since when did you ever know your place or keep it, either?”

“When Nanny leaves her place, believe me, you’ll know,” said Nanny.

One evening in early autumn, for fun they built up a fire in the yard. Frex was home and good-humored, and Nanny was thinking of heading back to Colwen Grounds, which made Melena good-humored too. Turtle Heart put together a supper, a distasteful goulash of small sour new apples and cheese and bacon.

Frex was feeling expansive. The effect of that blasted tiktok contrivance, the Clock of the Time Dragon, had been wearing off at last- thank the Unnamed God-and the graceless poor had been turning out to hear Frex harangue them. A two-week mission at Three Dead Trees had been a success. Frex had been rewarded with a small wallet of brass coins and barter tokens, and the glow of devotion or even lust on the face of more than one penitent.

“Perhaps our time here is limited,” said Frex, sighing with contentment and clasping his arms behind his head-the typical male response to happiness, thought Melena: to predict its demise. Her husband went

on. “Perhaps the road from Rush Margins leads us on to higher things, Melena. Grander stations in life.”

“Oh please,” she said. “My family rose from humble beginnings for nine generations, to produce me with my ankles in the mud out here in the middle of nowhere. I don’t believe in higher things.”

“I mean the lofty ambitions of the spirit. I don’t mean to storm the Emerald City and become personal confessor to the Ozma Regent.”

“Why not put yourself forward to be confessor to Ozma Tippetarius?” Nanny asked. She could see herself rising in courtly Emerald City society if Frex had such a position. “So what if the royal baby is only, what, two years old? Three? So we have government by a male regent again. It’s only for a limited engagement-like most male encounters. You’re young still-she’ll grow up-you’ll be well-placed to influence policy.

“I don’t care about ministering to anyone in court, not even an Ozma the Fanatically Devout.” Frex lit a sallowwood pipe. “My mission is to the downtrodden and humble.”

“Goodness should to travel to Quadling Country,” said Turtle Heart. “Downtrodden there.”

Turtle Heart didn’t often speak of his past, and Melena remembered Nanny’s gibe about her lack of curiosity. She waved the pipe smoke away and said, “Why did you leave Ovvels anyway?”

“Horrors,” he said.

Elphaba, who had been hoping for ants to crawl across the grinding stone so she could mash them with a rock, looked up across the shallow basin of the stone. The others waited for Turtle Heart to go on. Melena’s heart lifted uneasily-she had a sudden premonition of things changing right here, this very evening, this most splendid gentle night, things going awry just when they had managed to settle down.

“What sort of horrors?” said Frex.

“I feel a chill. I’ll get a shawl,” said Melena.

“Or minister to Pastorius! The Ozma Regent! Why not, Frex?” Nanny said. “I’m sure with Melena’s family connections you could twist an invitation-“

“Horrors,” said Elphaba.

It was her first word, and it was greeted with silence. Even the

moon, a lambent bowl among the trees, seemed to pause.

“Horrors?” Elphaba said again, looking around. Though her mouth was serious, her eyes glowed; she had realized her own accomplishment. She was nearly two years old. The big sharp teeth in her mouth could not keep her words locked inside her anymore. “Horrors,” she tried in a whisper. “Horrors.”

“Come to Nanny, darling. Come sit on my lap and hush for a while.”

She obeyed, but sat forward, apart from Nanny’s cushiony bosom, allowing Nanny’s arms to ring around her waist but no contact more than that. She stared at Turtle Heart and waited.

And Turtle Heart said in an awed voice, “Turtle Heart is thinking the child to speak for the first time.”

“Yes,” said Frex, exhaling a ring of smoke, “and she’s asking about the horrors. Unless you don’t care to tell

“Turtle Heart to say little. Turtle Heart to work in glass, and to leave words for the Goodness and the Lady and the Nanny. And now for the Girl.”

“Say a little, though. Since you brought it up.”

Melena shivered; she hadn’t gone for the shawl. She could not move. She was heavy as stone.

“Workers from the Emerald City and other places, they to come to Quadling Country. They to look and taste and sample the air, the water, the soil. They to plan the highway. Quadlings to know this is wasted tune and wasted effort. They do not to listen to Quadling voices.”

“Quadlings aren’t road engineers, I suspect,” said Frex evenly.

“The country is delicate,” said Turtle Heart. “In Ovvels the houses to float between trees. Crops to grow on small platforms hooked by ropes. Boys to dive in shallow water for vegetable pearls. Too many trees and there is not enough light for crops and health. Too few trees and the water rises and roots of plants floating on top cannot to stretch to soil. QuadlIng Country is poor country but beauty rich. It only to support life by careful planning and cooperation.”

“So resistance to the Yellow Brick Road-“

“Is only part of the story. Quadlings cannot to convince road builders, who want to build up dikes of mud and stone and to cut Quadling Country in pieces. Quadlings to argue, and to pray, and to testify, and cannot to win with words.”

Frex held his pipe in his two hands and watched Turtle Heart speak. Frex was drawn to him; Frex was always drawn to intensity.

“Quadlings consider to fight,” said Turtle Heart. “Because they think this is only the start. When the builders to test soil and to sift water, they to learn of things Quadlings are smart for ever, but Quadlings to keep still.”

“Things you know?”

“Turtle Heart to speak of rubies,” he said with a great sigh. “Rubies under the water. Red as pigeon blood. Engineers to say: Red corundum in bands of crystalline limestone under swamp. Quadlings to say: The blood of Oz.”

“Like the red glass you make?” said Melena.

“Ruby glass to come by adding gold chloride,” said Turtle Heart. “But Quadling Country to sit atop real deposits of real rubies. And the news is sure to go to the Emerald City with the builders. What to follow is horror upon horror.”

“How do you know?” snapped Melena.

“To look in glass,” said Turtle Heart, pointing to the roundel he had made as a toy for Elphaba, “is to see the future, in blood and rubies.”

“I don’t believe in seeing the future. That smacks of the pleasure faith,” said Frex fiercely. “The fatalism of the Time Dragon. Pfaah. No, the Unnamed God has an unnamed history for us, and prophecy is merely guesswork and fear.”

“Fear and guesswork is enough to make Turtle Heart to leave Quadling Country, then,” said the Quadling glassblower without apology. “Quadlings do not to call their religion a pleasure faith, but they to listen to signs and to watch for messages. As the water to run red with rubies it will to run with the blood of Quadlings.”

“Nonsense!” Frex fussed, red himself. “They need a good talking-to.”

“Besides, isn’t Pastorius a simpleton?” said Melena, who alone of them could claim an informed opinion on the royal house. “What will he

do until Ozma is of age but ride the hunt, and eat Munchkinlander pastries, and fuck the odd housemaid on the side?”

“The danger is a foreigner,” said Turtle Heart, “not a home-grown king or queen. The old women, and the shamans, and the dying: They to see a stranger king, cruel and mighty.”

“What is the Ozma Regent doing, planning roadworks into that godforsaken mire anyway?” Melena asked.

“Progress,” said Frex, “same as the Yellow Brick Road through Munchkinland. Progress and control. The movement of troops. The regularization of taxes. Military protection.”

“Protection from whom?” said Melena.

“Ahh,” said Frex, “always the important question.”

“Ahh,” said Turtle Heart, almost in a whisper.

“So where are you going?” said Frex. “Not that you need leave here, of course. Melena loves having you around. We all do.”

“Horrors,” said Elphaba.

“Hush now,” said Nanny.

“Lady is kind and Goodness is kind to Turtle Heart. Who did not mean to stay more than a day. Turtle Heart was on his way to the Emerald City and to get lost. Turtle Heart to hope to beg audience with Ozma-“

“Ozma Regent, now,” interjected Frex.

“-and to plead mercy for Quadling Country. And to warn of brutal stranger-“

“Horrors,” said Elphaba, clapping her hands together in delight.

“The child to remind Turtle Heart of his duties,” he said. “To talk of it brings duties back out of the pain of the past. Turtle Heart to forget. But when words are to speak in the air, actions must to follow.”

Melena glared hatefully at Nanny, who had dropped the girl on the ground and begun to busy herself with collecting the supper dishes. See what comes of prying and nosiness, Nanny? See? Just the dissolution of my only earthly happiness, that’s all. Melena turned her face from her horrid child, who seemed to be smiling, or was that wincing? She looked at her husband with despair. Do something, Frex!

“Perhaps this is the higher ambition we seek,” he was murmuring. “We should travel to Quadling Country, Melena. We should leave the

luxury of Munchkinland and try ourselves in the fire of a truly needy situation.”

“The luxury of Munchkinland?” Melena’s voice was screechy.

“When the Unnamed God speaks through a lowly vessel,” began Frex, gesturing at Turtle Heart, who was looking desperate again, “we can choose to hear or we can choose to harden our hearts-“

“Well, hear this, then,” said Melena, “I’m pregnant, Frex. I can’t travel. I can’t move. And with a new infant to watch as well as Elphaba to raise, it’s too much to suggest tramping around Mudland.”

After the stillness had lost some of its steam, she continued, “Well, I didn’t intend to tell you like this.”

“Congratulations,” said Frex coldly.

“Horrors,” said Elphaba to her mother. “Horrors, horrors, horrors.”

“That’s enough thoughtless chatter for one night,” said Nanny, taking charge. “Melena, you will catch a chill sitting out here. Summer nights are turning colder again. Come inside and let’s let that be that.”

But Frex got himself up and went to kiss his wife. It was not clear to anyone whether he suspected that Turtle Heart was the father, nor was it clear to Melena which one, her husband or her lover, was the father. She didn’t actually care. She just didn’t want Turtle Heart to leave, and she hated him fiercely for being so suddenly riven with moral feeling for his miserable people.

Frex and Turtle Heart conversed in low voices that Melena could not make out. They sat by the fire with their heads low together, and Frex had his arm on Turtle Heart’s shaking shoulders. Nanny readied Elphaba for bed, left her outside with the men, and came to sit on Melena’s bed with a glass of hot milk on a tray and a small bowl of medicinal capsules.

“Well, I knew this was coming,” said Nanny calmly. “Drink the milk, dear, and stop sniveling. You’re behaving like a child again. How long have you known?”

“Oh, six weeks,” said Melena. “I don’t want milk, Nanny, I want my wine.”

“You’ll drink milk. No more wine till the baby’s born. You want another disaster?”

“Drinking wine doesn’t change the skin color of embryos,” said Melena. “I may be a dolt but I know that much about biology.”

“It’s bad for your frame of mind, nothing more and nothing less. Drink the milk and swallow one of these capsules.”

“what for?

“I did what I told you I d do said Nanny in a conspiratonal voice Last fall I poked around the Lower Quarter of our fair capital on your

half-“

The young woman was suddenly engaged Nanny you didn’t t’ How .-r! Weren’t you terrified?”

“Of course I was. But Nanny loves you, however stupid you are. I found a store marked with the secret insignia of the alchemist’s trade.” She wrinkled her nose in recollection of the smell of rotting ginger and cat piss. “I sat down with a saucy-looking old biddy from Shiz, a crone named Yackle, and drank the tea and upended the cup so she could read the leaves. Yackle could barely see her own hand, much less read the picture.”

“A real professional,” Melena said dryly.

“Your husband doesn’t believe in predictions, so keep your voice down. Anyway, I explained about the greenness of your first child, and the difficulty of knowing exactly why it had happened. We don’t want a recurrence, I said. So Yackle ground up some herbs and minerals, and toasted it with oil of gomba, and said some pagan prayers and for all I know she spit in it, I didn’t watch too closely. But I paid for a nine months’ supply, to be begun as soon as you’re sure you’ve conceived. We’re a month late maybe, but this’ll be better than nothing. I have supreme confidence in this woman, Melena, and you should too.”

“Why should I?” said Melena, swallowing the first of nine capsules. It tasted like boiled marrow.

“Because Yackle predicted greatness for your children,” said Nanny. “She said Elphaba will be more than you credit, and your second will follow suit. She said not to give up on your life. She said history waits to be written, and this family has a part in it.”

“What does she say about my lover?”

“You are a pest,” said Nanny. “She said to rest and not to worry. She gives her blessing. She is a filthy whore but she knows what she’s talking about.” Nanny didn’t mention that Yackle was certain the next child would be a girl too. There was too much chance Melena would try to abort her,

and Yackle sounded quite sure that history belonged to two sisters, not a single girl.

“And you got home safely? Did anyone suspect?”

“Who would suspect innocent old Nanny of trading in illegal substances in the Lower Quarter?” laughed Nanny. “I do my knitting and mind my own business. Now go to sleep, my love. Nix to the wine for the next few months, and stay the course with this medicine, and we’ll have for you and Frex a decent, healthy child, which will provide no end of recovery for your marriage.”

“My marriage is perfectly fine,” said Melena, snuggling down under the covers-the capsule had a kick, but she didn’t want Nanny to know-“as long as we don’t go wading off into the muddy sunset.”

“The sun sets in the west, not in the south,” said Nanny soothingly. “It was a masterly stroke to bring up the pregnancy tonight, my dear. I wouldn’t come to visit you if you went paddling off into Quadling Country, by the way. I’m fifty years old this year, you know. There are some things Nanny is really too old to do.”

“Well nobody better go anywhere,” said Melena, and began to fall asleep.

Nanny, pleased with herself, glanced out the window again as she prepared to retire. Frex and Turtle Heart were still deep in conversation. Nanny was sharper than she let on; she had seen Turtle Heart’s face when he was remembering the threat to his people. It had opened like a hen’s egg, and the truth had fluttered and wobbled out of it just as naive as a yellow chick. And as fragile. No wonder Frex was sitting nearer to the beleaguered Quadling than Nanny thought was altogether decent. But there seemed no end of oddity to this family.

“Send the girl in so I can put her down,” she called from the window, partly to interrupt their intimacy.

Frex looked around. “She’s in, isn’t she?”

Nanny glanced. The child was not given to hiding games, neither here nor with the brats in the village. “No, isn’t she with you?”

The men turned and looked. Nanny thought she saw a blur of movement in the blue shadows of the wild yew. She stood up and held on to the window ledge. “Well, find her. It’s the prowling hour.”

“There’s nothing here, Nanny, it’s your overactive imagination,”

drawled Frex, but the men were up quickly, and looking around.

“Melena, dear, don’t sleep yet; do you know where Elphaba is? Did

you see her wander off?” said Nanny.

Melena struggled to lift herself to one elbow. She stared through her hair and her inebriation. “What are you on about?” she asked in a slur, “who is wandering off?”

“Elphaba,” Nanny said. “Come on, you better get up. Where could be. Where could she be.” She started to help Melena up, but it was

happening too slowly, and Nanny’s heart was beginning to beat fast. She

fixed Melena’s hands to the bedposts, saying, “Now come on, Melena, this is not good,” and she reached for her blackthorn staff.

“Who?” said Melena. “Who’s lost?”

The men were calling in the purple gloaming. “Fabala! Elphaba! Elphie! Little frog!” They circled out away from the yard, away from the dying embers of the dinner fire, peering and hitting at the lower branches of bushes. “Little snake! Lizard girl! Where are you?”

“It’s the thing, the thing has come down from the hills, whatever it is! cried Nanny.

“There’s no thing, you old fool,” said Frex, but he leaped more and more vigorously from rock to rock behind the lodge, smacking branches aside. Turtle Heart stood still, his hands out to the sky, as if trying to receive the faint light of the first stars into his palms.

“Is it Elphaba,” called Melena from the door, finally focusing, and stepping forward in her nightgown. “Is the child gone?”

“She’s wandered off, she’s been taken,” said Nanny fiercely, “these two idiots were flirting like schoolgirls, and the beast from the hills is abroad!”

Melena called, her words mounting in pitch and terror, “Elphaba! Elphaba, you listen to me! Come here this instant! Elphaba!”

The wind alone answered.

“She is not far,” said Turtle Heart after a moment. In the deepening dark he was almost invisible while Melena in her white poplin glowed like an angel, as if lit from within. “She is not far, she just is not here.”

“What the devil do you mean,” Nanny said, weeping, “with your riddles and your games?”

Turtle Heart turned. Frex had come back to him, to throw an arm around him and hold him up, and Melena came forward to his other side.

He sagged for a minute, as if fainting; Melena cried out in fright. But Turtle Heart straightened up, and began to move forward, and they headed toward the lake.

“Not the lake, not that girl, she can’t abide water, you know that,” called Nanny, but she was rushing forward now, using her staff to feel the ground ahead of her so she wouldn’t stumble.

This is the end, thought Melena. Her brain was too foggy to think anything else, and she said it again and again, as if to prevent it from being true.

This is the beginning, thought Frex, but of what?

“She is not far, she is not here,” said Turtle Heart again.

“Punishment for your wicked ways, you two-faced hedonists,” Nanny said.

The ground sloped toward the still, receded margin of the lake. First at their feet, then at their waists and higher, the beached dock rose, like a bridge to nowhere, ending In air.

Beneath the dock in the dry shadows there were eyes.

“Oh, sweet Lurline,” whispered Nanny.

Elphaba was sitting under the dock wIth the looking glass that Turtle Heart had made. She held it in two hands, and stared at it with one eye closed. She peered, she squinted; her open eye was distant and hollow.

Reflection from the starlight off the water, thought Frex, hoped Frex, but he knew the bright vacant eye was not lit by starlight.

“Horrors,” murmured Elphaba.

Turtle Heart tumbled to his knees. “She sees him coming,” he said thickly, “she sees him to come; he is to come from the air; is arriving. A balloon from the sky, the color of a bubble of blood: a huge crimson globe, a ruby globe: he falls from the sky. The Regent is fallen. The House of Ozma is fallen. The Clock was right. A minute to judgment.”

He fell over, almost into Elphaba’s small lap. She didn’t seem to notice him. Behind her was a low growl. There was a beast, a feiltop tiger, or some strange hybrid of tiger and dragon, with glowing orangey eyes. Elphaba was sitting in its folded forearms as if on a throne.

“Horrors,” she said again, looking without binocular vision, staring at the glass in which her parents and Nanny could make out nothing but darkness. “Horrors.”