The witch of maracoor, p.13
The Witch of Maracoor, page 13
“Does he help with the farm chores?”
“Shhh,” said Liir, grinning. “He thinks he’s the farmer and we’re his staff. It works okay that way. Don’t give him notions of subservience or we’ll never hear the end of it. All his sulking and airs.” Gardius was recovering from the ecstasy of a morning scratch. He opened his eyelids more widely as he took in Rain. His eyes protruded. The pupils were chocolate. His long and irregular nose twitched; an old shoe of a nose. He looked back and forth between Liir and Rain as if assessing. She could have sworn he raised an eyebrow in mock disbelief, but he had no eyebrows to speak of. Still, his manner spoke of skepticism.
She felt skeptical herself, but this wasn’t the day to sow any more discord at home than she could help. “Catch up with you later, Gardius,” she said. “You look as if you have a high opinion of yourself but I’m good at knocking that kind of thing down. We’ll schedule a couple of sessions when I get my ducks in a row.” Some ducks in a row, standing at the door, quacked, as if at Rain’s taking liberties with their good names.
In the sunlight again. The cottage was now old enough to look shabby—an improvement on her childhood, back when she’d watched and sometimes helped her mother and her father slap it together. After they’d been reunited and before they were again separated. That brief window of traditional childhood that, come to think of it, had offered Rain nothing more consoling than ordinariness.
And ordinariness is unquantifiable until it has evaporated. The unperceived paradise of childhood. Only recognized by the forever exiled.
She saw Trism off in a field, working with a plane, sizing the end of a beam to fit in the hole of a post. She thought about the old-timey expression for sex—dragon-snaking—but resisted making a joke about having a boyfriend who was a dragon-whisperer. Well, if she could think up a joke, she must be accommodating herself to this already. She was glad but weary, weary to the very salt on her skin.
“Does he fly?” she asked.
“You mean Trism?”
“I mean the dragon.”
“Well. Of course most dragons do. And Gardius has wings. But we think he hasn’t cottoned on to their usefulness yet. He swishes them about like they’re his personal set of boudoir draperies. We’re not eager for him to launch until he has better control of his combustible breath. He hasn’t mastered that sort of continence yet.”
Rain wasn’t sure what came next. The weariness that had swamped her wasn’t physical, and she didn’t know if she wanted to lie down. She said, “When Trism is busy with the heavy labor, what do you do?”
“I help sometimes. Lots of work needs four hands. But I’m still writing.” They had reentered the cottage. Liir made a gesture toward his pages on a side table. “Some days I’ve said everything there is to say, other days I’ve said nothing. It’s a struggle and it hurts my head and sometimes my digestion.”
“You were a cavalier when you were my age,” she said, without scorn. “You traveled the tumbrel-track of those times. Which were, um, prickly. All that unrest, the civil war. The abdication of Shell Thropp from the Throne Ministership.” She didn’t want to mention Mombey yet, or Tip. Yet, or maybe ever. But still. “You flew with the birds. You were magicked into the form of an elephant. Do you even remember anything about that?”
“An elephant never forgets.” He winked at her and went to pass his papers by, but she lingered.
“I’m being serious. After you’ve had the life of firebrand, however mild-mannered, I don’t know how you satisfy yourself with this punishment post.”
“You forget I’ve chosen it. I like it here. There’s something—” He paused. “Well. A word I rarely use, but I’ll risk it. Something sacred about this mounded hill between two lakes. I had a vision here once, when I was your age, or younger? Don’t remember. Maybe I was just drunk. Or malnourished. But I’ve always believed that the Grimmerie was brought into our world right here. Its bearer just sort of appeared between the trees, out of nothing. In my dream anyway. I hardly trust that places are sacred—either every place is, or no place is. But perhaps places are like people. Maybe they can be seared by their history somehow. I feel it here. A wound. Another world broke through here. I like to get a seat by the door at the theater in case of fire. I like being here.”
“Have you ever been to a theater?”
“Figure of speech. Yes, I’m still working on a treatise about the types of justice government ought to be capable of. If only to put my own thinking in order. But when it’s finished I’ll send it to the Emerald City in case it’s of use.”
He saw that she was hesitating. “Ozma hasn’t yet advanced to take the throne,” he told her. “The Cowardly Lion has agreed to stay on as her regent while she undertakes a course of private studies. Or that’s what’s said. History, I guess; maybe the rubrics of Palace protocol. No, I haven’t been back to the Emerald City. Neither have I left this homestead except to the market village, not once since you left.”
“Whyever not?”
He slanted her a look as if surprised she had to ask. “Ninny. What do you think? So I would be here to greet you when you got home.”
She had gone to the loft to find some old clothes, see if they would still fit. Dust hung in the angled heat. Immortal spores. Mouse droppings dotted the bedcovers, and the pillow reeked of mildew. She stretched out on the bed to catch a moment alone, and slept there unmoving till dawn. Almost a full cycle of a day and night. By the time she creaked down the steep ladder-steps, the breakfast table was laid for two. One set of dishes had already been used and was set aside in a drying rack.
“Trism has gone to market,” said Liir, coming inside with a bucket of well-water. “He’ll be gone two nights, maybe more. Wanted to give us time to catch up. Boy, that was an enchanted sleep. We could hear you snoring like a sawmill.”
Rain didn’t want to know if they had slept side by side, or closer, while she was passed out upstairs. Anyway, it seemed to matter less this morning. Accommodation. The natural erosion of expectation. She turned her back on the double bed in the corner and attended to a cup of coffee and a bowl of oats with late berries of some sort.
She and her father spent a half day orbiting around each other, speaking incidentally, scarcely troubling to rush and fill in the gaps. Rain was desperate to hear everything she could about Tip—about Ozma—but she didn’t want to grasp at her father with questions clinching like pincers. For his part, Liir mostly tamped the curiosity he surely had about her adventures. Maybe he didn’t want to encourage her memories of her travels. Maybe he didn’t believe she’d gone out of this world and into another. Almost as far as that Dorothy and her much ballyhooed Kanzizz.
Desultory, that was the word. Rain took a long walk around Fourth Lake, looking for yesterday’s loons, but they’d removed themselves this morning. She was pleased to see that she recognized quite a few specific trees. Whether her eye had been improved by meeting the Caryatids on the other side of the River Seethe, or whether she’d always clocked to the individuality of trees, she didn’t know. Amnesia may have wiped that sense of herself away, and now it was coming back. What else might still be inside her, waiting to return if it had half a chance.
Liir met her as she rounded the verge of the farther cove. He’d taken the path on the other side. They sat on a log for a while and watched autumn gnits spangle the air above the water. So she told him about the Caryatids, about Tesasi, their uncrowned queen. About Rain’s own promise to spread the tree pollen in a place that needed it. “Ithira Strand,” she said, as if he would know what she meant by that. He nodded gravely and asked her if she had any other obligations to these creatures of another soil.
“I suppose you mean that in a contractual sense,” she said.
“I mean it in any sense that it makes sense to you.”
She shrugged and acceded. The willowy affability of her father; it made him hard to pin down. “I only owe them my life, I guess. In a way. They introduced me to the Oracle of Maracoor and he revived the broom on which I returned to Oz. So without Tesasi, who knows where I’d be.”
“Oh, yeah, well. We’re all in debt to coincidence, if it comes to that. But you’re no longer carrying out a campaign for this tree chieftain.”
“No. Just need to live. Nothing more than that.”
He tried to skim a rock on the water; it plunked and sank without a single repeat. “One of the milestones of growing up is when we realize we can be done with living for others. Early on, we pay respect to the parents who gave us life by staying alive and living fully for them. Making their sacrifices worth it. I certainly labored under that belief for decades. But eventually we come round: we owe it to ourselves to live just as much as we owe it to anyone else.”
“I didn’t stay alive the last eighteen months to validate your fatherhood,” she said, only a little disingenuously. So what was his point.
“During my firebrand years, as you call them, I thought I had to rouse the rabble because it’s what Elphaba would have done had she been around to do it. I thought it was the least I owed her. In fact, the best I owed her was to live my life as genuinely as possible, not on her terms but on my own.”
“Is this a Life Lesson for me?”
“I wouldn’t dare try to give you a Life Lesson. I’m no fool.”
As they walked back to the cottage, Liir told her about the signs of encroachment of farmers and hunters from the Disappointments and other points near the eastern Great Kells. “This isn’t as much of an outback as it was a decade ago. Trism and I are even thinking of building a mill on the waterfall that comes into Fifth Lake. Not sure we could pull it off on our own, but we could get a team of fellows up from elsewhere to help us raise it.”
Affecting a stagey nonchalance that made her own skin crawl, Rain told Liir about how she’d met his putative grandfather—the Oracle of Maracoor. Formerly known as the Wizard of Oz. Liir stopped in the path. His head cocked to one side like a dog’s. It was, perhaps, rank disbelief. Did he think she was mad.
A long silence as he took it in and calibrated his response. “I’m only surprised to imagine that someone so old and so—um—fiercely traveled—could have absconded from the Palace—was that about twenty-five years ago?—and be holed up in yet another position of eminence in yet another nation.”
“More like imprisoned, due to his age and infirmity. But why should you be surprised? I bet he isn’t yet ninety. That’s not unfathomably old.”
“Did you catch any family resemblance?”
“With you? Hardly. But then, how many people that old have I ever met at all? The whole package was—” She made a gesture. “Something of a stretch to accept. Improbable.”
“I’ll bet. No, I mean, did you see any resemblance to yourself?”
“Ah. How could I do that? I hardly know myself. I can’t even recognize myself in my own dreams.”
“Travel is so broadening, don’t you think?” He was ribbing her on several levels at once. Could he really think maybe she was making this all up.
“Tell me about the Grimmerie, though,” he continued. “I’m as interested in the voyage that it took as I am in the one you took. Did you practice trying to read it while you were away? You have some small talent at that, as I recall.”
“Oh yes, I’m the Witch of Maracoor, now, didn’t I tell you? Iskinaary said so.”
“The Grimmerie,” he reminded her.
She told him the what’s-what of it as they went to the garden to find something for lunch. Some tomatoes with black spots that could be cut out, some robust broccoli, and a few fibrous whorls of asparagus that could be boiled into submission and served with salt. She told him about trying to drown the great book, and how her campaign had unleashed a storm that threw the world on the far side of the ocean out of whack. “And yet you have it still in your satchel,” he said. “Or is that a portfolio of sketches you made of your grand holiday?” Adding, “Stop, I’m only trying to be droll. I’m sorry. Don’t mind me—I’ve gotten out of the habit of kindness, maybe. Tell me what you want to tell me, and I promise not to interrupt with a slant remark.”
Rain controlled her temper as best she could. “The book came back to me. Apparently it had no intention of remaining drowned. I’ve returned it as intact as possible. It was a fool’s errand to think I could lose it.” She wiped her eyes, casting about for a diversion. On the wall above the desk, suspended on a loop of rawhide cord, hung her mother’s domingon. The shiny hairs of the bow were slack—maybe that was how it was properly stored—but the strings on the transept and on the fingerboard looked taut and ready for sound. “In tune?” she asked Liir, as much to change the subject as anything ese.
“I’m not the musical one,” he told her, but took it down. She could nearly remember her mother playing the old folk instrument. It involved dragging long drones out of the tightened bow, or bouncing percussive repeats—while the other hand pressed a fretted note with the thumb, and clawhammering it with one or more fingers on the same hand, sometimes on two or three strings at once, as the modet required. Melody and mood, figure and surround, from the same player. Probably no harder than managing a piano keyboard—and certainly more portable. “Do you want to try it?” asked Liir.
“I’m a lot of strange things,” said Rain, “but lyrical isn’t one of them.” She put her hand onto the strings and felt them vibrate, and imagined she could coax melody forward. “Is there any such thing as written music for this weird item?”
“There were one or two scraps of paper on which Candle had written some notations.” He rummaged through a drawer. “Do you read music?”
“I hardly read, period.”
“Ah, here we are.” A browning length of paper that had once wrapped a poundweight of milled sugar. Candle’s hand had drawn racks of notes in ascending slopes, but the lines—the actual music staff—were missing. So who could play them? “She knew the arrangement of strings and frets,” Liir said, anticipating Rain’s questions. “Those little bars and dots below are positional references. She told me about them. These are arpeggios—she described them as chords broken free of their pack, moving in the same direction either up or down the scale. Something like that.”
“Music without ruled lines seems anarchic if not an invitation to migraine.”
“She has a natural talent, that one,” said Liir obscurely. “I won’t give you the instrument, as it belongs to her. Once in a while when she does come along to make sure I’m still alive, she plays for me. Or for herself—who can ever know which of us deserves the suspended continuo or the broken chord? The domingon does both at once.”
“One for each of you,” she said, not certain if she was being ferocious or consoling. But that was music for you.
“About music, I only know this trick.” He plucked a tenor string. A single note vibrated with confidence and perfect violence; you could almost see it. Before it faded, Liir hovered the pad of his forefinger in the air just above the string, offshore, not touching it. A second tone emerged, in keen pitch, a kind of response, softer than the first, following and amplifying the earlier testimony, riding a half-scale above the earlier tone. A steel pearl in the air like a tiny gazing globe, all the world reflected in it. “That’s all the magic I know how to do,” said Liir. “It’s called a harmonic. Don’t ask me how it works. It’s a ghost note emerging from the world of the original. It doesn’t really exist on its own, it only comes out as a response to the first. I suppose the way a shadow doesn’t exist unless cast by an object. But the conditions have to be right.”
“Is that a metaphor for my life?” she asked.
“I know you’re still young,” he replied, “but not everything is about you. If this is going to do heavy work in the Metaphor Brigade, it might as well be about me, don’t you think? Don’t I get a metaphor?”
They ate their lunch in silence. Then she took the Grimmerie out at last and plopped it upon her father’s papers, where it pressed them flat, like a judge and jury. She turned her back on it, cutting it dead, socially speaking.
After lunch Liir lit a small pipe. They went to examine what was left of the fence repair that Trism had abandoned to give them their privacy. There wasn’t much. With four hands at the job, they easily installed the replacement slats and then walked the fence, stringing cord across wider slots through which a baby lamb might conceivably bound by accident. Returning to the barn, they released the flock into its pasture. Gardius made moan to join them but Liir didn’t think he was quite ready.
The next morning, a warm and inoffensive rain. More leaves had changed overnight. Yellow-gold, and red so red it was purple. Chores were done swiftly, and a second pot of tea brewed, and a fire built up in the chimney. “Where are you going to lodge this book now?” asked her father. “If you tried to sink it and it wouldn’t stay sunk, what’s next? You want to toss it in the fire?”
She couldn’t tell if he was joking again. “I don’t think it would burn, or that it would stay burnt. The ashes might go up the chimney and then rain down upon the roof in specks of paper one letter at a time.” She was being nonsensical and speculative at the same time, trying a hypothesis. “Anyway, maybe after all that, I was wrong to take it. The book is yours, isn’t it? Not mine.”
“Not mine either. But maybe it belongs here. If that little dizzy memory of mine has any validity, the old man who carried the Grimmerie materialized on Nether How. I heard that he walked north to Kiamo Ko and deposited it there for safekeeping. Maybe best it be kept safe here. If he ever again manifests out of nothing and comes back for it, he’ll have to come across us first. We’ll give him some tea and return him his book.”
“Where really do you think it came from?” asked Rain. “The Oracle told me it came from his original world, which is someplace other than Peare.”
Liir didn’t know the expression Peare. Rain explained: “The whole world. The us-and-them of it. Not just Oz, not just ‘here.’ But all of it. All of us bound up. A planet, if we’re a planet; a plate, if we’re a plate. The word that means ‘Oz and Maracoor and any place else not discovered yet.’”
