“We found Liir!” they said. “Come on, we think he’s dead! He’s fallen in the fishwell!”
r /> They all pounded down the stairs to the basement. Chistery had been the one to find him. The snow monkey’s nose had wrinkled when he and the boys passed the fishwell, and he had whined, and whimpered, and tugged at the weighted cover. Nor and Irji had had an idea to lower him down in the bucket then, but when they swiveled the cover off, the lurid gleam of light on pale human flesh had terrified them.
Manek came running when he heard the noise of his mother and the others exclaiming before the well. They pulled Liir up. The water had risen, what with continued melting and the further rain. Liir was like a corpse left in a stream, bloated. “Oh, is that where he was,” said Manek in a funny voice. “You know he said he wanted to go down in that fishwell once.”
“Get away, children, you shouldn’t see this, go upstairs,” Sarima said, scolding. “Come on now, behave, upstairs for you.” They didn’t know what they were looking at and they were afraid to look too closely.
“I cannot believe it, this is so terrible,” said Manek excitedly, and Elphaba gave him a sharp, hateful look.
“Obey your mother,” she snapped, and Manek made a nasty face, but he and Irji and Nor clomped upstairs, and huddled around the open doorway at the top to listen, and peer.
“Oh, who has the art of medicine in their hands, have you, Auntie?” asked Sarima. “Quick now, there may be time. You have the arts, don’t you, you studied the life sciences! What can you do?”
“Irji, go get Nanny, tell her it’s an emergency,” shouted Elphie. “We’ll bring him up to the kitchen, gently now. No, Sarima, I don’t know enough.”
“Use your spells, use your magic!” exclaimed Five.
“Bring him back,” urged Six, and Three added, “You can do it, don’t be hidden and shy about it now!”
“I can’t bring him back,” said Elphaba, “I can’t! I have no aptitude for sorcery! I never did! That was all a foolish campaign of Madame Morrible’s, which I rejected!” The six sisters looked at her askance.
Irji escorted Nanny to the kitchen, Nor brought the broom, Manek brought the Grimmerie, and the sisters and Sarima brought the body of Liir, dripping and bloated, and laid him on the butcher’s block. “Oh, now who’s this one,” mused Nanny, but got to work pumping the legs and the arms, and set Sarima to pressing in at the abdomen.
Elphaba flipped through the Grimmerie, she screwed up her face and hit herself on the temple with her fists, and wailed, “But I have no personal experience with a soul—how can I find his if I don’t know what one looks like?”
“He’s even fatter than usual,” said Irji.
“If you prick his eyes out with a magic straw from the magic broom, his soul will come back,” said Manek.
“I wonder why he went in the fishwell?” said Nor. “I never would.”
“Holy Lurlina, mercy on us, mercy!” said Sarima, weeping, and the sisters began to mumble the service of the dead, honoring the Unnamed God for the life departed.
“Nanny can’t do everything,” snapped Nanny, “Elphaba, be some help! You’re just like your mother in a crisis! Put your mouth on his and push air into his lungs! Go on!”
Elphaba wiped the wet off Liir’s pasty face with the edge of her sleeve. The face stayed where it was pushed. She grimaced, and nearly vomited, and spit something into a bucket, and then she sank her mouth down on the child’s, and breathed out, pushing into the sour passage her own sour breath. Her fingers tensed at the sides of the butcher’s block, gouging splinters, as if in an ecstasy of sexual tension. Chistery breathed along with her, breath for breath.
“He smells like fish,” Nor said under her breath.
“If that’s what you look like when you drown, I’d rather burn to death,” said Irji.
“I’m just not going to die,” Manek said, “and nobody can make me.”
The body of Liir began to choke. They thought at first it was an involuntary reaction, air from Elphaba’s mouth pocketing and blurting out again, and then there was a small stream of yellowish yuck. Then Liir’s eyelids moved, and his hand twitched of its own accord.
“Oh mercy,” Sarima murmured. “It’s a miracle. Thank you Lurlina! Bless you!”
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” said Nanny. “He may still die of exposure. Quick now, off with his clothes.”
The children watched the silly indignity of grown-up women tearing stupid Liir’s trousers and tunic off. They rubbed him all over with lard. This gave the children a case of the giggles, and made Irji feel very funny in his trousers, for the first time in his life. Then they wrapped Liir in a woolen blanket, which made quite a mess, and prepared to put him to bed.
“Where does he sleep?” said Sarima.
They all looked at one another. The sisters looked at Elphaba, and Elphaba looked at the children.
“Oh, sometimes on the floor in our room, sometimes on the floor in Nor’s,” said Manek.
“He wants to sleep in my bed too but I push him out,” said Nor. “He’s too fat, there’d be no room for me and my dollies.”
