He leaned on the table, but it was not enough support. He sat on the floor and looked numbly at Glinda. She moved now, though slowly and stiffly.
"It is over," she said. "I knew that you should stay in the castle."
"I'm not sure that you did not plan all this."
She smiled slightly. "No, Hank. I did not know what would happen when she came here. If it hadn't been for you I'd be dead."
The light outside was getting a little brighter.
"Did you... really make a compact with the... Bargainer?"
"No, Hank. I lied to Erakna to shake her up, make her less confident, confuse her."
"Glinda the Good," he murmured.
Author's Notes
1. Somewhere out there is somebody who will check up on the weather at Fort Leavenworth on April 1, 1923. Don't bother unless you want the exercise. I got my data from the Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Times. An interesting item which has little to do with the weather is that the "King Tut Craze" was just reaching its peak. The professional models who appeared on Easter day at the Auteuil races in Paris wore King Tut hats, green robes with slashed sleeves, floppy waists, tight hips, long skirts, and slashed gauntlets. Many had kerchiefs with Egyptian figures around the necks and arms.
2. The circumstances surrounding President Harding's death were mysterious, or so many claimed. One ex-government official even wrote a book in which he claimed that Mrs. Harding had poisoned her husband. This story seems, from all known, to have been a vile canard. Mrs. Harding did, however, refuse to let an autopsy be performed on her husband. Thus we can speculate that the coroners may have missed Glinda's calling card, but the embalmers would have found it. Perhaps they did not. In any event, the Signal Corps project was kept secret. Somewhere in the U.S. government files, though, may be the complete story. It would be as difficult to find as the Ark of the Covenant, also stored by the government.
3. Did the ancestors of the Amariikians diminish in stature because of something in the water? Or was the shrinking caused by the presence of the firefoxes? No one, except possibly Glinda, knows.
4. If the energy beings called mind-spirits or firefoxes could be used by old red witches to keep them animated, why didn't the witches use them to transfer their mind contents to new bodies? The answer is that the body the witch would like to possess had a mind which would have rejected any attempt at takeover. However, it was said that there had been a few times when firefoxes possessed idiots. If this was so, why didn't the witches use the firefoxes to possess idiots? They undoubtedly tried to do this, but they failed. A firefox operating by itself could sometimes possess an idiot. But the combination of a firefox and the mind-contents of a witch could not effect a transportation, though the witch could control the firefox while it was in her own body. In fact, the witch, if she tried to shunt her mind-contents to another body, was likely to have them discharged electrically, erased as a tape is erased. The firefox would then take over the body and mind structure with ease. After this happened a few times, the old red witches avoided this type of attempt at longevity.
5. The Witch of the East was killed by the impact of Dorothy's house falling over her, and she immediately became dust. The Witch of the West dissolved into a puddle of water when Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her. (This action by Dorothy could be called "dirty pool.") I had figured out some years ago just how these two events came about, but it is only fair to record that Doctor Douglas A. Rossman, in an article, "On The Liquidation of Witches," in The Baum Bugle, Spring, 1969, extrapolated much as I had. I was not a member of the International Wizard of Oz Club then, but when I found out about the article in 1981, I had Fred Meyers, the Club's secretary, send me a copy.
Water or violent impact may, under certain conditions, break down the force which holds large molecules together. The old red witches using firefoxes to energize them after they had died had no blood, and it was only the firefoxes which kept them from sloughing away, from becoming dust. I suspect that, in time, the old witches would have fallen apart without the intervention of water or a very hard impact.
6. In Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the West Witch is afraid of the dark. Was this a neurosis or were all of the red witches fearful of the dark places? Hank never asked about this, but I suspect that, if all the red witches had this feeling, it was because they dreaded encountering the Bargainer there. Or perhaps they were apprehensive that some thing a white witch might have sent would be lurking there.
7. I regret that I had to cut out a section where Hank, on his way back from the city of Long-Gones, finds the very old and dying Wizard. This might have been a touching scene and would have thrown some light on Oz's career in two worlds. But the length of the novel forced me to make this decision.
8. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum said that there were no dogs or, at least, the natives had never seen or heard of any. In a later book, he said that no horses existed there. This is strange, since the ancient Goths would have brought both animals in with them. If you accept Baum's premise that the human beings originated there instead of migrating from Earth, the absence of dogs and horses is still puzzling. There are indigenous North American plants and animals there and some types of animals from Africa and Asia. (But I've explained why Dorothy would wrongly identify the lion, mastodon, and sabertooth as the African lion and elephant and the Asiatic tiger. She never saw the mastodon or tiger, and the American lion looked like the African lion, though it was much larger.)
In reality, the Goths and Celts did bring in horses and dogs, and the Amerinds did bring in dogs. However, the newly arrived humans had great difficulty in hunting the sentient animals they found there. Most of these were too intelligent to be easily caught, and the meat-starved tribes ate the dogs and horses. What they did not devour, the beasts of prey did.
During this time, a few horses and dogs must have been possessed by firefoxes, but these sentients were too few to reproduce in large enough numbers to survive.
What about the domestic fowl? The answer is that the ancient Goths, Celts, and Amerinds did not have them. These came into Europe from Asia at a later time. The Amariikians talked some wild fowl into cohabitating with them as egg-suppliers. In return, the fowl were protected from the predators.
9. The Natawey are native Americans, what used to be called Indians or Amerinds. (To me, anybody who's born in the Americas is a native American.) The Natawey speak Algonquin dialects related to the tongue of the Pequots, Naticks, Shawnee, and Illinois, among others. Their words for tobacco and other indigenous North American plants were borrowed by the Caucasian Amariikians.
I would have liked to have taken Hank into Nataweyland, where he would have observed that their civilization had certain parallel developments to those of the Olmecs, Mayans, and Incas. There would also be many differences. Again, the length of the novel, if I'd done this, eliminated this excursion.
10. The Quadling dialect is the least archaic or most changed of all those descended from Gothic. The examples are not what I would have given if I had had special phonemic symbols available. I used "a," "o," and "u" to indicate two different sounds for each, and I made no distinction between long and short vowels. I also preserved Baum's spelling of Quadling, Munchkin, Winkie and Gillikin.
Hank thought that Glinda's name was derived from a Gothic word similar to the English "glint." He was wrong. If it had been, it would have been Glindo. It was derived from a word borrowed from the pygmy Neanderthals. That the meaning was similar to that of "glint" was a coincidence.
Word-terminal 5 in Amariikian was lost unless it was preceded by a vowel; s then became z. Thus stains (stone) became stain, and fotus (foot) became fotuz.
The personal name, Sharts, and a few other words were exceptions because they came into the Quadling language after the change.
Word-internal s between voiced sounds became z. Thus, fraliusan (to lose) became, during this stage, fraliuzan.
Word-initial i and word-internal i, when followed by u, were palatalized and so pronounced like the y in "year." Fraliuzan became fralyuzan.
At a later stage of Quadling, y (represented in the Gothic alphabet by j) became the sound ofy in the English "jalousie."
I have represented this by zh. This change is similar to that in some South American Spanish dialects in which "yo" (l) became "zho."
Winkie and Gillikin, however, did not experience this change. That is why the Sneezer's name is Nabya, not Nabzha.
Fralyuzhan then became, in Quadling, fraizhuzhan. The al became a diphthong, the i compensating for the loss of l.
Word-internal t became d between voiced sounds. Thus, bota (advantage) became boda. Bota may be related to the English "booty."
The aspirate h was lost except when word-initial followed by a vowel. Aspirated word-initial w did not lose the aspiration.
Gothic did not have the sounds which English represents as sh (as in ship) and as ch (as in church). Hewever, these first came into the language through some Neanderthal loanwords. Munchkin, for example, which was originally Munichikin. At a later stage, t and s followed by u became palatalized and then became ch and sh.
Thus, tuggo (tongue) became tyuggo and then chuggo. (The first g would be pronounced as the n in "sink" or the ng in "king.") The change of palatalized / to ch has taken place in other languages, including English.
Kiusan (to choose, to test) became kuzan, became kyuzan, became chuzan.
There were other sound changes which I won't go into here.
Quadling went through a process during which internal syllables collapsed, though not to the extent which Old Norse experienced. Gender and number were almost entirely eliminated. Except for a few forms, all the cases disappeared. The nominative singular case form was kept as the base form for nouns except for a few. The genitive was formed by the addition of j after word-terminal unvoiced sounds and of z or vowel plus z after word-terminal voiced sounds. There were, however, some exceptions to this.
The accusative forms of the personal pronoun were kept, though, when Hank arrived, the mass of people were inclined to use the nominative for the accusative. The academicians were fighting a losing battle against this.
The scholars attributed the wholesale regularization of Quadling to the long and close contact with the Neanderthals and the ancestors of Blogo's people. (His ancestors were not so rare then.) There is no evidence to confirm this theory.
I would like some day to translate The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into Quadling, but I have so many similar projects which I've only half-finished or never started that I can't be sure I'll carry out this project.
11. It is possible that Hank's explanation for the animation of the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow and for the sentiency of animals was wrong. It is also possible that he misread the hieroglyphics on the Long-Gone obelisk. Notice that Glinda neither denied nor accepted the validity of Hank's reasoning. Glinda, when Hank was not around, may have had a good laugh at his arguments.
Baum did not record her other title, Glinda the Ambiguous.