On the day the seven-year maunt was to leave, Sister Bursar took the huge iron key from her bosom and unlocked the store chamber, and said, “Come in.” She pulled from the press three black shifts, six camisoles, gloves, and a shawl. She also handed over the broom. Finally, for emergencies, a basket of simples—herbs and roots, tinctures, rues, salves and balms.
There was paper, too, though not much: a dozen pages or so, in different shapes and thicknesses. Paper was in ever shorter supply in all of Oz. “Make it last, make it important,” advised Sister Bursar. “You’re a bright one, for all your sulks and silences.” She found a pen. A pfenix feather, known for the endurance and strength of the quill. Three pots of black ink, sealed under knobby wristholds of wax.
Oatsie Manglehand was waiting in the ambulatory with the old Superior Maunt. The convent was paying a decent penny for this service, and Oatsie needed the fees. But she didn’t like the look of the sullen maunt that Sister Bursar ushered in. “This is your passenger,” said the Superior Maunt. “Her name is Sister Saint Aelphaba. She’s spent many years in solitary life and in nursing. The habit of gossip is lost. But it’s time for her to move on, and move on she will. You’ll find her no trouble.”
Oatsie looked the passenger over and said, “The Grasstrail Train doesn’t promise the survival of its party, Mother. I’ve led two dozen trips these past ten years or so, and there have been more casualties than I like to admit.”
“She leaves of her own free will,” said the Superior Maunt. “Should she wish to return at any point, we would take her in. She is one of us.”
She didn’t look one of anything to Oatsie, neither flesh nor fowl, neither idiot nor intellectual. Sister Saint Aelphaba just stared at the floor. Though she seemed to be about thirty, she had a sallow, adolescent look about her.
“And there’s the luggage—you can manage it?” The Superior Maunt pointed to the small heap of supplies in the immaculate forecourt in front of the mauntery. Then she turned to the departing maunt. “Sweet child of the Unnamed God,” said the Superior Maunt, “you go from us to conduct an exercise in expiation. You feel there is a penalty to pay before you may find peace. The unquestioning silence of the cloister is no longer what you need. You are returning to yourself. So we send you from us with our love and with our expectations of your success. Godspeed, my good sister.”
The passenger kept her eyes trained on the ground and did not answer.
The Superior Maunt sighed. “We must be off to our devotions.” She peeled a few notes from a roll of money kept in the recesses of her veils, and handed them over to Oatsie Manglehand. “This should see you through, and more besides.”
It was a healthy amount. Oatsie stood to earn a lot from escorting this taciturn woman through the Kells—more than from the whole rest of her party combined. “You are too good, Mother Maunt,” she said. She took the cash with her strong hand, and made a gesture of deference with her limp one.
“No one is too good,” said the Superior Maunt, but nicely, and retired with surprising speed behind the cloister doors. Sister Bursar said, “You’re on your own now, Sister Elphie, and may all the stars smile you on your way!” and she disappeared as well. Oatsie went to load the luggage and supplies in the wagon. There was a small, chunky ragamuffin boy asleep behind the trunk. “Off with you,” said Oatsie, but the boy muttered, “I’m to go too, that’s what they told me.” When Sister Saint Aelphaba neither confirmed nor denied this plan, Oatsie began to understand why the payment to take the green maunt away had been more than generous.
The Cloister of Saint Glinda was located in the Shale Shallows, twelve miles southwest of the Emerald City. It was an outpost mauntery, under the aegis of the one in town. Sister Saint Aelphaba had spent two years in town and five years here, according to the Mother Maunt. “You want to be called Sister still, now that you’re sprung from that holy prison?” asked Oatsie as she clucked the reins and urged the packhorses on.
“Elphie is fine,” said the passenger.
“And the boy, what’s he called?”
Elphie shrugged.
The coach met the rest of the caravan a few miles on. There were four wagons in all, and fifteen travelers. Elphie and the boy were the last to join. Oatsie Manglehand outlined the proposed route: south along the edge of Kellswater, west through Kumbricia’s Pass, northwest through the Thousand Year Grasslands, stopping at Kiamo Ko, and then wintering a bit farther northwest. The Vinkus was uncivilized land, Oatsie told them, and there were tribal groups to be wary of: the Yunamata, the Scrow, the Arjiki. And there were animals. And spirits. They would need to stick together. They would need to trust one another.
Elphie showed no sign of listening. She fiddled with the pfenix feather and drew patterns in the soil between her feet, coiling shapes like dragons writhing or smoke rising. The boy squatted eight or ten feet away, wary and shuttered. He seemed to be her page, for he managed her bags and attended her needs, but they did not look at each other, or speak. Oatsie found it strange in the extreme, and hoped it didn’t augur ill.
The Grasstrail Train set off at sunset, and made only a few miles before its first camp at a streambed. The party—mostly Gillikinese—chattered in nervous amazement at their courage, to go so far afield from the safety of central Oz! All for different reasons: for business, for family needs, to pay a debt, to kill an enemy. The Vinkus was a frontier, and the Winkies a beknighted, bloodthirsty folk who knew little about indoor plumbing or the rules of etiquette so the party regaled itself in song. Oatsie took part for a short time, but she knew there was hardly one among them who wouldn’t prefer to stay where they were and avoid the depths of the Vinkus altogether. Except perhaps that Elphie, who was keeping pretty much to herself.
They left the rich edge of Gillikin behind. The Vinkus began with a mesh of pebbles spread on brown wet soil. At night the Lizard Star pointed the direction: south, south along the edge of the Great Kells, to the dangerous gap of Kumbricia’s Pass. Pines and black starsaps stood up like teeth on every embankment. By day they were welcoming, sometimes giving shade. By night they towered, and harbored snatchowls and bats.
Elphie was often awake at night. Thought was returning to her, perhaps expanding under the fierce openness, where the birds cried in falling voices, and the meteors stitched omens into the sky. Sometimes she tried to write with her pfenix feather; sometimes she sat and thought words out, and didn’t commit them to paper.
Life outside the cloister seemed to cloud up with such particularity—the shape of her seven years past was already being crowded out. All that undifferentiated time, washing terra-cotta floors without dipping her hands in the bucket—it took hours to do a single room, but no floor was ever cleaner. Making wine, taking in the sick, working in the infirmary wing, which had reminded her briefly of Crage Hall. The benefit of a uniform was that one need not struggle to be unique—how many uniquenesses could the Unnamed God or nature create? One could sink selflessly into the daily pattern, one could find one’s way without groping. The little changes—the red bird landing on the windowsill, and that was spring—the leaves to rake from the terrace, and that was fall—they were enough. Three years of absolute silence, two years of whisper, and then, moved up (and outward) by the decision of the Superior Maunt, two years on the ward for incurables.
There, for nine months—thought Elphie under the stars, picturing it to herself as if telling someone else—she tended the dying, and those too clumsy to die. She grew to see dying as a pattern, beautiful in its way. A human form is like a leaf, it dies in a set piece unless something interferes: first this, then that, then this. She might have gone on as a nurse forever, arranging wrists in a pleasing pattern above starched bedsheets, reading the nonsense words of scripture that seemed to help so. She could manage the dying.
Then, a year ago, pale invalid Tibbett was carted to the Home for the Incurables. He wasn’t too far gone to recognize her even be
hind her veil and silences. Weak, unable to shit or piss without help, his skin falling in rags and parchment, he was better at life than she was. He selfishly required that she be an individual, and he addressed her by her name. He joked, he remembered stories, he criticized old friends for abandoning him, he noticed the differences in how she moved from day to day, how she thought. He reminded her that she did think. Under the scrutiny of his tired frame she was re-created, against her will, as an individual. Or nearly.
At last he died, and the Superior Maunt had said that it was time for her to go and atone for her mistakes, though not even the Superior Maunt knew what they were. When that was done?—well, she was still a young woman, she could raise a family. Take her broom and remember: obedience and mystery.
“You can’t sleep,” said Oatsie one night as Elphie sat under the stars.
But though her thoughts were rich and complicated, her words were poor, and she merely grunted. Oatsie made a few jokes at which Elphie tried to smile, but Oatsie laughed enough for both of them. Big, full laughs. It made Elphie tired.
“Isn’t that cook a piece of work?” said Oatsie, and told some episode that seemed pointless, and she chortled at her own story. Elphie tried to enjoy, tried to grin, but above her the stars grew thicker, more like glittering fishspawn than salt; they turned on their stalks with a cursing, grinding sound, if only she could hear it. She couldn’t hear it; Oatsie was too coarse and loud.
There was much to hate in this world, and too much to love.
Before long they came to the edge of Kellswater, a murderous slice of water lying as if cleft from the side of a thundercloud. It was all gray, no lights on it. “That,” said Oatsie, “is why the horses don’t drink from it, nor travelers; that’s why it was never tapped in aqueducts and run to the Emerald City. It’s dead water. And you thought you’d seen it all.” Still, the travelers were impressed. A lavender heaviness arose on its western edge—the first hint of the Great Kells, the mountains that separated the Vinkus from the rest of Oz. From here the mountains appeared as thin as gas.
