“I want to meet Dorothy,” he said.
“You’re not that age already, please preserve us,” she said. “I always intended to pickle you before you got to puberty.”
“Well, I’m not getting kidnapped, so don’t worry,” he said. “Besides, I want to be here when they get here.”
“Worry is the last thing I’d do if you got kidnapped,” she answered. “It’d be your own damn fault, and a great relief to me to have one less mouth to feed.”
“Oh well, then who’d carry the firewood up all those stairs every winter?”
“I’ll hire that Nick Chopper fellow. His axe looks pretty sharp to me.”
“You’ve seen him?” Liir’s mouth dropped open. “No, you haven’t!”
“I have, as a matter of fact,” she said. “Who says I don’t travel in the best circles?”
“What’s she like?” he said, his face eager and bright. “You must have seen Dorothy too. What’s she like, Auntie Witch?”
“Don’t you Auntie me, you know that makes me sick.”
He pestered without stopping until finally she had to screech at him. “She’s a beautiful little dolt who believes everything everybody says to her! And if she gets here and you tell her you love her, she’ll probably believe you! Now get out of here, I have work to do!”
He lingered at the door, and said, “The Lion wants courage, the Tin Man a heart, and the Scarecrow brains. Dorothy wants to go home. What do you want?”
“A little peace and quiet.”
“No, really.”
She couldn’t say forgiveness, not to Liir. She started to say “a soldier,” to make fun of his mooning affections over the guys in uniform. But realizing even as she said it that he would be hurt, she caught herself halfway, and in the end what came out of her mouth surprised them both. She said, “A soul—”
He blinked at her.
“And you?” she said in a quieter voice. “What do you want Liir, if the Wizard could give you anything?”
“A father,” he answered.
13
She wondered, briefly, if she was going insane. That night she sat up in a chair and thought about what she had said.
A person who doesn’t believe in the Unnamed God, or anything else, can’t believe in a soul.
If you could take the skewers of religion, those that riddle your frame, make you aware every time you move—if you could withdraw the scimitars of religion from your mental and moral systems—could you even stand? Or do you need religion as, say, the hippos in the Grasslands need the poisonous little parasites within them, to help them digest fiber and pulp? The history of peoples who have shucked off religion isn’t an especially persuasive argument for living without it. Is religion itself—that tired and ironic phrase—the necessary evil?
The idea of religion worked for Nessarose, it worked for Frex. There may be no real city in the clouds, but dreaming of it can enliven the spirit.
Perhaps in our age’s generous attempt at unionism, allowing all devotional urges life and breath under the canopy of the Unnamed God, perhaps we have sealed our own doom. Perhaps it’s time to name the Unnamed God, even feebly and in our own wicked image, that we may at least survive under the illusion of an authority that could care for us.
For whittle away from the Unnamed God anything approximating character, and what have you got? A big hollow wind. And wind may have gale force but it may not have moral force; and a voice in a whirlwind is a carnival barker’s trick.
More appealing—she now saw, for once—the old-timers’ notions of paganism. Lurlina in her fairy chariot, hovering just out of sight in the clouds, ready to swoop down some millennium or other and remember who we are. The Unnamed God, by virtue of its anonymity, can’t ever be suspected of a surprise visit.
And would we recognize the Unnamed God if it knocked on our doors?
14
Sometimes she napped, against her will, her chin sagging on her chest, sometimes driving right down to the tabletop, jarring her teeth and rattling her jaw, and startling herself awake.
She had taken to standing at the window, looking down in the valley. It would be weeks before Dorothy and her band arrived, if indeed they hadn’t already been murdered
