D: L&L - Part 37 | Scarecrow: The Last Stand at Scarecrow Tower

The tower creaked and moaned with every breath of the wind, but it hadn’t fallen yet. Neither had we. A small mercy. In fact, we’d got on somehow, this girl and I. It was almost like spending a quiet moment with Dorothy. Almost. Only a Dorothy with a tactician’s mind, always on alert, suspicion in her eyes as Turlo came and went, and I sifted through old memories laid waste at my feet.

I avoided the one unbroken glass pain in the tower. It looked down on the last battlefield, but for the years and the undergrowth, a graveyard of bones. My mind settled on poppies again and again -- our first battle with the Wicked Witch, and we’d lost even that. Without Glinda’s snow, we would have never reached the Emerald City, the lies of the Wizard, the death of Elphaba, the balloon, the departure of innocence and Glinda stepping into her greatest treasure.

Wind howled, whisking away the groan that formed in my straw innards as I pictured the army standing at the base of the tower, the other marching relentlessly forward like copper coins.

Dot crouched beside the hearth, clearing a patch of dust with a sweep of her hand. She looked up at me, expectant. She looked better, color in her cheeks again, less hollow.

“Show me,” she said.

I slumped down opposite her, my knees crackling like dead twigs. Dead inside for so long, ever since… “Show you what, exactly? How I orchestrated the worst military disaster in Ozian history?”

She shrugged. “Start with the tower.”

I stared at the dust. Blank as the future. Then sighed and leaned forward.

“Fine. You asked for it.”

I jabbed a straw finger into the dust and sketched a rough circle. “This was us. Scarecrow Tower. Not much of a tower, really. Just this old watchpost on the southern ridge overlooking the Munchkinland River. The river you went for a dip in.”

Dot nodded, ignoring my quip, tracking my rough dust scratchings. “And your forces?”

I scratched out four smaller circles around the tower. “Munchkins in the center. Winkies on their right flank. Equinots here”—I stabbed the left flank of the Munchkins—“and the Animals in reserve. Lions, Tigers, Wolves, Eagles—every Creature in Oz I could summon, stood there.” Dot’s eyebrows told me what I needed to know, what her grandmother would have missed all those years ago. “She didn’t tell you about any of this, of course. How could she? So many creatures in Oz; so many Creatures.” Could she tell the difference when I said the words? My breath caught in my throat, and I heard the rustle of straw as my hand trembled just above the map.

I could wipe it all away now, before we started, before a single teardrop I couldn’t cry fell.

She must know. You must tell it.

I shook my head. If I began to tell it, it could never be untold. And this girl, this strap of a man child, and her Toto would walk away. She was not her grandmother.

You must tell it. Tell it all. There’s no other path forward, unless you want to be the Head Crow forever.

I swallowed, pulled at my sleeve, and I went on, the words forming of their own accord, the history of my failure spilling out onto the floor. 

“So many Creatures. The Winkies, the people of The Vinkus -- my people.” I faltered, my fingers losing their way as the words settled into the dust. My people like dust in the wind before her army. My people standing guard on the ramparts of the towers of Kiamo Ko. My people, blue skin as deep as night, the same hue I’d reveled in before the straw. “The Equinots -- horsemen, but not like you imagine. They don’t ride Horses; what creature would? No, these were more a melding, a merging of Horse and Man -- a Horse of a Different Colour altogether.”

“A centaur? You have centaurs? Horse on the bottom; man on top?” Dot's eyes gleamed. Was this not a thing in her world? They had a name for the Creatures, after all? “You’re not joking.”

I shook my head. “Equinots, we called them. Creatures of such size and strength. The champions of the Animals that day. They came down out of the Hidden Valley, led by Lox, their leader and king, and they stood with us. And behind them all, a few dozen Animals. A Bear, a Tiger, even an old Wolf long of tooth and into retirement after a career in elementary education. The Tiger was an administrator in Shiv. The Bear and his mates had been part of a travelling band. Not soldiers, mind you, but they’d read the writing on the wall -- too many walls, walls I’d intended to paint over once the deed was done and the TikToks finished.”

"TikToks?"

I grimaced and drew a line encircling us like a tightening noose. "The TikTok Army. Hundreds of the little bastards. Built for war, programmed for obedience." When the words didn’t sink in, I tried a different tactic. “Little metal bastards with spikes and spears.”

“Infantry. But you had cavalry -- horses, you said. Centaurs.”

Tell her how you underestimated them.

I cleared my throat. "I thought... we could hold. That if we stayed close to the tower, protected our flanks, we'd outlast them. I figured they’d rust in the dew if we dragged it out long enough. We had a good sized contingent, weapons from the Armory of Oz, and the Winkies had long been servants of the Wicked…er, Elphaba, protecting her from the Wizard. There was no reason to fear.”

Dot snorted. "That's... optimistic."

"You have no idea. We didn’t count on Glinda’s magic, the way she could repair them as fast as we broke them. One little bastard smashed to bits with the swing of a club, smashed by a spear, trampled by hooves, and it lay crushed like a discarded toy in the wet grass." I closed my eyes and remembered the first time I saw it. “Until it unfolded itself and went back into action.”

Dot's head snapped up. “They…what?”

I nodded. "Good as new a few seconds later. Not a dent, a crinkle, a single spot of rust. A hundred crushed in the first wave by the Equinots, and then a hundred up and pushing into the ranks of the Munchkins, falling on the flanks of our…centaurs."

I sketched tiny swooping arcs through the dust, the vision of the catastrophe playing out in my head.

No wine tonight, Scarecrow. Unburden yourself.

"And the magic?" she asked.

I shuddered and sat back.

"She conjured... phantom beasts. Firestorms that weren’t real but panicked our ranks. Walls of light that split our forces. The Munchkins were the first to break ranks -- farmers all of them, besides a small honor guard for Imperial visits to the tower. Little hands made for corn fritters and fried corn, street corn and corn muffins. Not swords, plows. And the TikToks plowed them under, seeding the entire field with a generation of Munchkinlander blood. Even now nothing will grow down there except prickly buzzweed."

Dot's hand hesitated over the dust for a moment. She contemplated the chaos: my squiggles, broken lines, scattered circles. A battlefield dissolving like sand in a storm. The memories blasting away at my mind, cutting away all the veneer until it was raw and exposed.

"And you?" she asked softly.

"I stayed in the tower as long as I could. Rallying whoever I could find. Calling them back to the center. But the TikToks kept coming. Like ants. No fear. No hunger. Just—"

Just purpose.

"—just purpose," I echoed hollowly.

I pointed to a tiny mark near the tower. "The Animals fell closest to the base, holding until the very end.” And finally, a shaky line leading away from the tower. "And me."

"You ran," Dot said.

"I ran."

Dot sat back, studying the dust. The battlefield laid bare.

"Outthought, outfought, outmagicked." I leaned back against the cold stone wall and closed my eyes. "All I had were brains. Turns out, brains don’t mean a damned thing when you're surrounded by creatures that don't think and can’t die."

They only obey.

Dot didn’t speak for a while. Just stared at the dust map, lips pressed thin. “And your friends? My grandmother’s friends? What about the Lion? The Tin Man? Surely a man made of tin survived.”

I felt an anger rise from within me. Telling my story of woe to this woman had opened up wounds Munchkinlander wine had kept buried for fifty years. Hearing my voice tell it all as plain as you like made me relive those painful days when everything I’d worked for went belly-up. Those moments when my friends weren’t there.

“I can’t call them that anymore,” I said. “You could say that we didn’t part on the best of terms.”

“What happened?”

“Before Glinda started her move against me, the Lion had found his place and purpose. And when I called for help, my spies told me he was already firmly in her camp.” I shivered. “It seems the cowardly side of that bastard never really left him. I should’ve known better than to expect anything different. But perhaps he knew everything I didn’t -- ironic that. A whining, sniveling wimp during our entire journey with Dorothy, only to become a preening prince of pop, finding his roar in making others cower.”

Dot’s eyes narrowed. “Did you confront him about this?”

“I never got the chance,” I replied. “I was exiled from Emerald City before I could see him. And I re-established the crown here.”

“And you call him a coward?” Dot eyed me, then looked away, as if she couldn’t stand the sight of me. I knew that look. I’d seen it in every mirror I’d seen for fifty years. “What about Iron Man?”

“Tin Man,” I said.

“Whatever,” Dot shrugged. “Tin, iron, does it matter? How did you lose him?”

I bristled. “I didn’t,” I almost yelled. “He lost himself. In love.”

She looked surprised. “One in pride. The other in love. The rest in battle. You lost everyone.”

I avoided her gaze, stared back at the window. “I even lost myself. Who I was before this straw. To tell you the truth, I don’t much remember what it was like. Only that my name was Fiyero...and I sometimes talk to myself – or to my other self.”

“Fiyero,” Dot said suspiciously. “And what does he want?”

Redemption.

“To be a man again.”

“And maybe," she said, brushing the dust map away with a sweep of her hand, "you will be again, if it gets me home."

I smiled then. A real smile.
A broken emperor and a girl with a cracked compass.
Against a queen with an army of metal and magic.

It was suicide.
It was impossible.
It was perfect.