Macurdy got off the bench, wincing again. Going to the candle, he took a cartridge from his pistol and pried the bullet out with his jackknife, planning to toss the powder onto the embers, to see if it flared up. But when he shook the cartridge case over his palm, nothing came out. He peered inside it. Empty! They’d worked when he’d taken target practice. He tried another, then went to his jacket, and from a pocket took one of the large cartridges for the .45-70; it was empty too.
Grunting, he turned to Professor Talbott. “No powder. They were fine, three, four days ago.”
Talbott said nothing, just sat staring at his hands, which lay folded on his knees. For a moment Macurdy stood thoughtful, then tossed the brass case into the ashes and sat down again. “You know what you never told me?” he said. “What they call this place. Not Missouri, I don’t suppose.”
“Oz.” Talbott pronounced it Ohz. “Imagine it being spelled as in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but pronounced with a broad O.”
“I remember that book. We had it in school.” Macurdy grinned. “I didn’t know you could get to Oz from Missouri. Thought you had to start from Kansas.
“Hmm. O-Z, but pronounced like in Ozark. I expected there’d be Ozarks on this side, too; expected to come out on something like Injun Knob.”
“There are mountains not very far west of here,” Talbott answered, “considerably higher than the Ozarks. You can see them in the daytime. They may be why the forests are so thick. We seem to have an orographically-enhanced summer monsoon here, off what they call the Southern Sea, which I suspect is less landlocked than the Gulf of Mexico. And the winters are wet, with frontal storms out of the west. Though the moisture for them might be from the Southern Sea, too, brought in by cyclonic circulation around the storm front.”
Macurdy only half-listened, not comprehending at all. And at any rate seeing something more interesting to him. Talbott was a gaunt, bent, oldish man, his hair and beard mostly white but with black streaks. The lines in his leathery face reflected weather and hardship. His rough wadmal breeches were ingrained with dirt; his homespun shirt had been snagged and darned. His callused hands hadn’t known soap for years, and their nails were black and broken.
But as Macurdy looked, the scarecrow figure became a tallish, lanky man in brown tweed and a green bow tie, clean-shaven and with his hair parted neatly in the middle. Dirt and calluses had no part of the image. He saw it plain as day, and it occurred to him that this kind of seeing was a magic power. Maybe, he told himself, going through the gate had jarred it loose for him.
They continued talking until Macurdy, who’d gone abruptly from midnight to noon, got sleepy. Talbott took down one of the straw-filled sleeping pads. Macurdy lay down on it and went to sleep.
To waken wide-eyed from some bad dream. Talbott had snuffed the candle, and the fire had burned down to embers again. Macurdy got up painfully and felt his way to the door, to stand outside gazing up at the sky. There was the Big Dipper, there the pointer stars. And there the North Star; in school, Mr. Anderson had called it the Pole Star, Polaris. Same stars, it seemed like, but a different world beneath them.
It struck him then that there was no longer a guard at the door. But there remained the palisade, and according to Talbott, a spearman who patrolled the night with a large dog on a leash. Escaping now made no sense anyway, Macurdy told himself. He needed to learn the language here, and something of the people, or he’d have no chance in hell of finding Varia.
10: The Shaman’s Apprentice
When the slaves were mustered for the day’s labor details, Macurdy and Talbott were put to work digging a large pit in stiff clay, the worst kind of pick and shovel labor. Brought up to work hard and fast, Macurdy impressed the overseer, and on the second day his ration was increased that evening.