The clearing at the edge of the Gillikin Wood
The world, in that hour, was very still.
I had been lying in the long grass of the clearing for the better part of the afternoon, my arms folded behind my head, my axe in the clover beside me, my chest open to the sky. The sun had found me through a break in the Gillikin’s canopy, a long amber column of it falling across my shoulders and chest, and I was letting it. I cannot feel warmth the way I once could. I was a man of flesh once, and I remember the difference, the way you remember a word in a language you no longer speak: the shape of it present, the substance gone. But I feel something. A quality of knowing. A registering of the light’s presence that is not sensation precisely but is not nothing either, and I have spent enough years with this particular mystery to have arrived at something like peace with it.
I am not a man who comes easily to peace with things. I arrive there by long roads.
The clearing is small, a break in the canopy where an old tree fell years ago, and the forest has declined to rush its replacement. The grass grows long and thick here in the season’s warmth, and I had come to it the way I sometimes come to places that ask nothing of me: quietly, with no particular intention beyond the being-there. A wood-mouse had found the hollow of my elbow and made its decision. A lizard, slim and iridescent, moving with the deliberate sovereignty of a creature that owns whatever surface it occupies, had claimed the broad plane of my chest and arranged itself there with its chin lifted, its sides expanding and contracting in slow and lordly contemplation. A pair of beetles had established a circuit around the curve of my knee, patient and purposeful, as though the route held some significance I was not privy to.
I watched the lizard breathe.
I am the Tin Woodsman, Nick Chopper, Emperor of the Winkies, by an appointment I have left in capable hands and try not to think about too often. I am an adviser to Ozma of Oz, and I hold more obligations than I generally pause to count, which is deliberate, because counting them is not restful. There are roads that want walking and councils that want attending, and the slow, quiet crises of neighboring kingdoms that arrive at my door with the reliability of weather. Between all of it, there is very little space left for afternoons like this one.
I have learned to take them anyway, when they come.
Here, in the long gold of the Gillikin afternoon, there was only the lizard and the beetles and the wood-mouse warm against my elbow and the sound of the Wood breathing around me. I was, in the manner available to me, at peace.
I heard the Scarecrow, Crow, long before I saw him.
This was not difficult. He moves through the world with the particular sound of his own making, a dry and purposeful whisper of straw against cloth, the soft rhythmic impact of stuffed boots on uneven ground, and the occasional surprised exclamation when a root catches him mid-stride. He is not a quiet traveler. He has never needed to be, having arrived long ago at the cheerful assumption that the world will accommodate him as he is, and finding, to no one’s particular surprise, that the world generally does.
I have been listening to that sound for more years than I care to count. It has become, without ceremony or announcement, one of the sounds I most like to hear.
I did not stir. The lizard tilted one jeweled eye toward the sound and dismissed it.
“Nick!”
The voice came from the trees at the clearing’s edge, carrying with it, as it always does, an energy that is not quite urgency and not quite alarm but something bright between the two: the characteristic note of a mind that finds everything interesting and cannot quite suppress the fact of it. Then a moment later, quieter, coming closer through the undergrowth: “Nick.”
I let out a long breath through the working of my jaw. It is the sound nearest to a sigh that my construction allows, and I have grown fond of it over the years, fond of the evidence that I can approximate the thing even if I cannot quite achieve it. “Aye,” I said, to the trees and to whoever was coming through them. “I am here, my heart.”
A rustling. The soft thump of a boot finding a root and negotiating with it. And then Crow came out of the Gillikin Wood and into the afternoon, and I looked at him the way I always look at him, with the full attention of someone who has been looking for years and has not found it becomes less worth doing.
He is a fine sight, as he always is, and would deny this with great sincerity if told so. The particular rolling gait of someone whose knees have been stuffed into approximate alignment and are doing their sincere best. His painted face, wide-mouthed, bright-eyed, the expression fixed by the hand that made him into something that reads, to anyone who hasn’t learned its language, as simply cheerful, and reads, to me, as an entire conversation. His hat is tall and battered and entirely beloved, its brim turned up on one side from years of being swept off and crammed back on in haste, and today it was threaded around with a crown of small wildflowers, blue and white and yellow, gathered with the casual precision of someone who walks through beautiful things and cannot quite help collecting them. His jacket was dusted with pollen at both elbows. There was a smear of dark soil at one painted cheekbone, and he was entirely unaware of it.
It suited him. Most things Crow does not intend about himself suit him exactly. I noticed this early, back on the road, and have never stopped finding it true.
He stopped at the clearing’s edge and regarded the scene, me, flat in the long grass, the mouse in the elbow, the lizard on the chest, the beetles at the knee, with his head tilted at the angle that means he is performing mild exasperation while being, in fact, very pleased to have found what he found.
“Basking,” Crow observed.
“Resting,” I said, with considerable dignity.
“You are lying in the direct afternoon sun with a lizard on your chest and a mouse asleep in your elbow.” He folded his arms, which required a moment of concentration and was accomplished with reasonable success. “I am reasonably well-read, Nick. The word for what you are doing is basking. I am nearly certain of it.” The wildflowers nodded as he tilted his head further. “And I want you to know, I am keeping count; this is the third time I have found you in precisely this condition.”
“Three occasions of perfect contentment,” I said, “which a person of your considerable intelligence might examine as a pattern worth understanding, rather than an aberration worth correcting.”
I watched his painted face make the expression, the slight deepening of the permanent curve of his mouth, the quality that enters the eyes, that means: that is a genuinely good point, and I find I cannot entirely disagree with it, and I am very glad to be here. He unfolded his arms with the ease of someone never deeply invested in the argument, and his whole bearing shifted from the performance of concern to the simple fact of arrival.
He looked at the mouse. His face made something careful and warm. “You will lower your voice,” he said to himself, and lowered it.
“Sleeping,” I confirmed.
“I can see that.” He looked at the lizard next, with the expression he reserves for small creatures going about their business with conviction. Then he looked at me, at my face, silver and still against the long grass, turned up toward the column of light, and what was in his eyes was the thing that is always there when he looks at me for more than a moment: an attention so full and so specific it has always struck me as the realest thing I have ever been on the receiving end of.
“Very well,” he said, quietly. “I concede the mouse.”
I did not rush. I brought my free hand to the crook of my elbow and with one broad silver finger, gentle in the way that large things learn gentleness when they have reason to practice it long enough, I stroked the wood-mouse once along its back. It stirred. I stroked it again. It lifted its small black-bead eyes, blinked at the silver face above it, and seemed to make some rapid internal assessment of its circumstances. Then, with the dignity of a creature that departs on its own terms, it slipped into the long grass and was gone.
The beetles scattered. The lizard, finding its terrain in motion, vanished into the clover without ceremony.
I rose. I gathered the axe from the clover, settled it in my left hand, and extended my right.
Crow crossed the clearing and took it without pause, in the way of someone who has long since stopped treating a thing as a choice and knows it simply as the next thing. He stepped in close, and I curled my arm around him: firmly enough to mean it, carefully enough to mean more. He settled into the curve of my arm with the easy completeness of a thing finding its usual place. His straw was warm from the afternoon. He smelled of sun and grass and very faintly of pollen.
I looked out over the clearing. The afternoon was still beautiful. I was aware of it the way you are aware of things you know are temporary, with a sharper attention, an effort to hold the quality of the light, the particular warmth of his weight through my arm.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“The east fields. The old barley ground, where they’ve let it go to meadow.” He tilted his head back to look up at me, the wildflowers nodding with the motion. “There were butterflies unlike anything in my notes, wings the precise color of a coal just before it goes grey, with a structural iridescence at the margins I couldn’t account for without better equipment and more light. I spent the better part of two hours attempting a classification.” A pause, and then the thing I love best in his voice, bright, genuine, entirely unguarded: “I was unsuccessful. It was enormously satisfying.”
I felt the thing in my chest that has no business being there and is there anyway. I felt it the way I feel the sun — not as sensation but as knowing, as a registering of something present and real.
“The soil on your cheek,” I said.
He reached up and made a confident attempt at entirely the wrong cheekbone. “Better?”
“Considerably worse,” I said, and cleaned it myself, the edge of my broad thumb, one practiced motion. He stood still for it with the quality of someone who has learned that some kinds of attention are worth receiving without deflection. I had noticed early that Crow accepts being cared for more easily than he accepts being praised, and had filed this away as one of the things worth knowing about him. I have a long list of such things.
“The pollen at the elbows,” he said, looking down at himself with the mild interest of someone surveying low-priority damage, “is a lost cause, I think.”
“The jacket will need seeing to.”
“It always needs seeing to.” He looked up, and his face settled into the particular ease it finds in certain places, this clearing, this light, here. “I find I don’t much mind.”
“I know you don’t,” I said.
The afternoon was going gold toward evening. There would not be many more of these before the season turned. I wanted to hold it a moment longer.
“What shall we do this evening?” I asked. I knew what he would say. I asked anyway, because I like to hear him say it.
He was quiet for a moment, the kind of quiet that means he is deciding how to ask for something. I have known this particular quiet long enough to recognize it before the words arrive.
“I thought,” Crow said, “that you might read to me.”
He asks it plainly, without preamble or apology, without the self-diminishing frame a man less certain of himself might put around such a request. He wants what he wants and says so. This has always been one of his finest qualities.
“Of course,” I said. “We’ll go in. I’ll read. It will be an excellent evening.”
I meant this entirely, believing our evening to be set and settled.
I was wrong.
The bubble came through the last of the amber light as though the canopy had opened to receive it, and perhaps it had. In Oz, such courtesies between living things and necessary arrivals are not beyond the realm of possibility. It descended in a column of rose-coloured luminescence, large and unhurried, and within it, seated with the perfect composure of someone who has long since made her peace with unusual transport, sat the Lady Glinda.
She stepped from it onto the grass as it dissolved, and I had two thoughts in rapid succession. The first: that she was beautiful in the way of significant weather on a distant horizon, radiant and enormous, carrying with her the atmosphere of things about to be required of you. The second, arriving cold and immediate behind it: something is wrong. Glinda does not come in person for small things.
Beside me, Crow straightened, the small involuntary rectification of a person who takes ceremony seriously without being solemn about it.
“My Lady,” he said, and bowed. It was a genuine bow, executed with the earnest whole-heartedness he brings to all formal gestures, which meant it listed somewhat to the left before he caught himself. “Glinda. You have found us.”
“I have,” she said. Her voice was warm and clear, and beneath it I heard the weight of something that had been carrying a difficult thing for some time. Her eyes moved between us, careful and deliberate. “My dears.” A pause. “I am afraid I have need of you both.”
I moved my axe from my left hand to my right without deciding to. Old habits. “Tell us,” I said.
She told us. Glinda delivers difficult truths in the manner of a physician who has learned that clarity is kinder than cushioning, each word placed where it will be heard, nothing softened into vagueness. The Lion had been in the Emerald City for three days. He was not eating. He would not speak with anyone, not Ozma, not the court, not those who had tried with genuine and dedicated love. He had not left the rooms he’d been given. He would not, as near as anyone could determine, sleep.
I listened and felt each piece of it settle into me in turn, heavy and specific. I did not let myself go toward what it might mean; I was no use to the Lion from here, and so I held myself back from imagining and kept my attention on what was being said.
“We believe,” Glinda said, and her eyes found mine and held them with a directness that had no room for warmth, only honesty, “that he will speak with you. That whatever has brought him to this, he cannot hold it alone in the same room as you two.” A pause, deliberate. “He needs to be heard. There is no one else in this land who will let him hear. He did speak on his first day to Jellia, but that too has stopped.”
I looked at the axe in my hand.
I thought of the Lion. The road, years ago now, was another chapter of the same life. The great animal pressed close against my side in the dark before the Witch’s gates, shaking with a fear that had not yet found its name, trying to be brave and making, by any honest measure, a very decent effort of it. The Lion’s face on the road when he had first understood that the thing he called cowardice was something else entirely, that the virtue he had believed he was missing he had carried the whole way without recognition, because no one had ever thought to tell him that courage is not the absence of fear but the refusal to be governed by it.
Dorothy told us things like that. Plainly, without drama, as though the truth of a person were obvious to anyone who cared to look. She is far away now, in the world she came from, living the life that is hers, and I think of her the way you think of a place that made you — with love and with the knowledge that you cannot live there, and that this is as it should be, and that it does not stop the love.
“Both of us?” Crow said quietly, beside me.
“Both of you,” Glinda confirmed. Something in her face when she looked at Crow was the expression she has for things she is grateful for and will not labor. “As you have always been.”
I felt Crow go still beside me, not the stillness of uncertainty but its opposite, the stillness of a decision already made and waiting only for the moment to say so. I knew this stillness. I was in it too.
“Tell Ozma we will be in the Emerald City before nightfall,” I said. I set the blade of my axe to the earth. “We leave within the hour.”
Glinda’s face, in the fraction of a moment before composure settled back into place, was simply and completely relieved, and that relief told me more than everything she had said. “I will tell her,” she said. And then, quietly, looking at us both: “Thank you.”
She rose. The bubble remade itself around her and carried her up through the Gillikin canopy as the sun continued its long descent, until she was only a rose-coloured point of light among the first emerging stars, and then nothing at all.
We stood in the clearing in the falling dark.
I was looking at the place where the bubble had been. I was thinking about the Lion in a room in the Emerald City, not eating, not sleeping, saying good morning through a closed door, still doing that, still finding it in himself to say good morning, which meant that somewhere underneath whatever had taken him, he was still the Lion. Still himself, in some essential way that had not yet been reached. I held onto this. There is always one thing worth holding in a hard situation, and finding it early is most of the work.
“He answered Jellia,” Crow said. He was working something through, I could hear it in his voice, the particular quality of his thinking-aloud, careful and sequential, each piece placed before the next is reached for. “On the first day, that is what Glinda said.” A pause. “A man entirely gone does not respond, Nick. Whatever has happened to him, it hasn’t taken all of him.” He looked at me steadily. “That matters.”
“It matters a great deal,” I said.
He nodded once, filing the conclusion, preparing to build from it. Then he looked at the pack at the clearing’s edge, and something shifted in his bearing, almost imperceptibly, the way a change in wind direction is felt before it is named. “The lantern,” he said, with the care of someone choosing their approach. “Is there one in the pack?”
“There is.”
“Good.” A pause, and I knew its shape before he continued. “I prefer not to walk a long dark road without a light.”
“You prefer not to walk near a lit flame,” I said. Not a correction. Simply true, and sayable between us.
He was quiet for a moment. Then, with the voice he uses when being accurate about things he would prefer to be inaccurate about: “I know the precise conditions under which straw ignites. I have done the calculations more than once, and I find that repeating them does not improve the results.”
I reached into the pack and found the lantern. “I will carry it,” I said. “Glass between the flame and you at all times. My arm between the flame and you at all times. The light serves us both, and the fire has no opportunity to be otherwise.” I met his eyes. “You have my word.”
He examined this the way he examines logical propositions, methodically, looking for the gap, the place where it might not hold. I waited. I am good at waiting.
“Your word,” he said at last, “I will take.”
I lit the lantern with the extreme care I always bring to this particular task, striking the flint, cupping the first catch of light, lowering the glass fully before bringing it anywhere near where Crow stood. He stepped back a half-step by old reflex, and I moved the lantern wide before raising it, giving him the maximum distance between himself and the flame. Neither of us remarked on this choreography. It is simply the way the thing is done, worn smooth by repetition into something that functions, now, almost like grace.
I hung the lantern from the notch at the heel of my axe-haft and raised the axe so the light swung out before us in a warm and steady arc.
Crow examined the arrangement. Then he extended his hand.
I took it. I settled my arm around his narrow straw shoulders, and we walked out of the clearing together and south into the Gillikin dark. He hit a root almost immediately. The forest floor has a hundred small treacheries, and his feet have an old and unresolved quarrel with all of them. My arm tightened and set him right without comment, without breaking stride. He never remarks on this. Some things between us have moved past the need for remark.
The trees thinned. The forest opened.
The yellow brick road ran out before us in the lantern-light, broad and even and very old, worn smooth by more years and more feet than I can easily count, including my own. I looked down at it. At the amber of it in the lantern’s glow, the certainty of it running south through the dark. I have walked this road afraid. I have walked it uncertain of what I was, whether the thing in my chest that called itself love was love, or only the idea of it, a man’s ghost haunting a tin body. I was wrong about that. I eventually understood that I was wrong. But the question left its mark, the way all old wounds do, healed over, changed in the texture of the thing above them, present without insisting.
I am not afraid now.
I feel the axe in my hand and the light of the lantern and Crow’s hand in mine, warm even through the glove, and I think about the Lion alone in the Emerald City saying good morning through a door because he is still, underneath it all, himself, and I step out onto the yellow bricks.
Crow steps with me. Our hands adjust and settle, finding the grip they always find.
“Tell me something on the road,” he says, after we have walked a while in the comfortable dark. “You always find things worth saying when we walk. I am deprived of our reading time, so I would hear you speak.”
“I don’t know what to say about this yet,” I tell him. “Not until I see him.”
“Then say something else.” A pause, quiet and honest. “I find I want to hear your voice, Nick. That’s all.”
I look at him, the painted face in the warm light, the wildflowers still bravely occupying the battered hat, the eyes that have never once, in all the years I have known them, looked at me with anything less than their full and genuine attention. I feel the thing that lives where a heart would be. I feel it the way I feel the warmth of the sun, not as a sensation, but as knowing. As a registering of something present and real, and, after all this time, no longer in need of argument.
I call it by his name, in the private accounting I keep of such things, because that is what it feels like. Like him. Like the specific and irreplaceable fact of him.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll tell you about the road.”
“Yes, tell me about the road,” Crow says, and settles closer into the curve of my arm.
I begin to talk, low and steady, and we walk south together through the Gillikin dark, the lantern making its small gold circle over the ancient bricks, the night patient on either side, the Emerald City a faint smudge of green waiting at the edge of the world ahead.
Behind us, the clearing is empty. The grass where I lay still holds the shape of me, faintly, in the pressed-down stems, the outline of an afternoon that was, for a little while, entirely sufficient.
By morning, it will be gone.
We do not look back.
