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Glinda smiled. "At dawn then."
"If the weather's good."
"Don't worry. It will be."
He did not believe, as her subjects did, that she could control the weather. But she might have meteorological data brought to her by her bird agents. And, after three hundred years, she must be able to "predict" weather as well as or better than the best weather-forecasters of Earth. Not that that meant much.
Before sunrise, he was flight-checking the Je
Two hawks, Shii and Windwaldriiz, were in the front cockpit. Ot was with Hank so she could navigate for him; Windwaldriiz would leave them when they got to the Emerald City to carry the news to Glinda; Shii, when they got to the Winkie ruler's castle.
The gray light brightened, and the sun rose swiftly from the horizon. Hank said a see-you-later to the queen. Lamblo came up to him and said, "Kiss me, Hank."
He hesitated. She said, "Don't be bashful. Everybody knows about us."
"I'll bet," he said. "Even the Gillikins."
He bent down and lifted her up to the level of his face and gave her a long kiss. When he set her down, he looked at Glinda. She was smiling. He would have felt better if she had looked just a little bit jealous.
He climbed into the cockpit. The motor had been warmed up, so it started quickly and smoothly when a Quadling spun the propeller after Hank yelled, "Contact!" He used the English word, which he had taught the two men assigned to him as mechanics.
The wheel blocks were pulled aside, and he eased in the throttle. The Je
His course lay northwest by north. He had had to adjust the compass since there seemed to be ten degrees difference in true north here and on Earth. In any event, he did not need the instrument. Ot would notify him at once if he deviated from the flight path. She was standing by his left hip now, jammed into the space between him and the cockpit fuselage wall. Better she was there, even if it crowded them, than on his shoulder. Birds, unlike the animals, could not control their evacuations. Hank had had to clean off his jacket after their last flight. Ot was on a thick cloth now, and, if it was dirtied, it would be thrown away when they landed.
The weather was as pleasant as Glinda had said it would be. At three thousand feet altitude, the Je
Twenty minutes later, he took off again. An hour before dusk, he touched down at a larger village near a small river.
His quarters were ready, a room in the house of the Kaizar, the elected leader, the equivalent of a mayor. Hank would rather have slept in a barn and have the people kept away from him. He was far from being antisocial, but he needed time for some hard exercise and eight hours' sleep. The locals were hot to ply him with questions, food, and liquor, give a big party for him, and keep him up as late as possible with their merry-making.
Also, he might as well sleep in a barn since there were no beds big enough for him. When he was in his host's house, he had to stoop to get through the doorway and hunch over to keep from bumping his head against the ceiling. He supposed he'd have to sleep on a pile of blankets.
The questions shoved at him were about equally divided among queries about Earth, the witch-queen, whom few of them had seen, and the rumors of the threatening invasion by the Gillikins. Hank sighed with weariness when he thought that he'd have to put up with these at every stop. But he did his best to be genial and reply as best he could. After all, he was sort of an ambassador to Oz, and he was Glinda's representative.
Also, he liked these tiny people even if the piping voices of a mob pressing on him did get on his nerves. They were, in many respects, alien, but on the whole they seemed friendly and hospitable. The young unmarried women did their best, some openly, others subtly, to get him to sleep with them. He rejected them reluctantly and gently. Though tempted, he told himself that Lamblo was, in a way, his fiancee. She had not asked him to marry her and might never do so. But the attitudes and circuitous comments of the castle people made him think that they were, in effect, engaged.
These people were morally rigid in some of their ways, ways that Americans would have thought peculiar. In others, they were liberal to an extent that would have outraged and repulsed many Americans, especially those in the Bible belt.
However, he told himself, a Quadling in America would have had the same reaction towards different mores. But then so would a West African or Malay.
He and the hawks got up in the morning with hangovers. He ate a light breakfast, which caused his host and family to shake their heads and tsk-tsk. How could he keep his giant body going on such a small amount of food? He did not reply. He wanted coffee badly. In fact, he awoke every morning lusting for steaming-hot black Java.
The next day, near noon, he came to the edge of a thick forest, unbroken by tilled land, unmarked by humans. It stretched ahead of him for two hundred miles, if Ot was right. Hank had been told that, long ago, the wise if often draconian ruler-witches had decided that the forests made natural obstacles to war. But what strengthened this decision was the will of the creatures of the forest. They were willing to give the humans a certain space, if they made no attempt to enlarge it at the wild beast's expense. Here, the animals were sentient and could fight back with an intelligence that Earth's animals lacked.
So, by ancient agreement, humans lived within their allotted space with their domestic animals. The wild animals kept to their woods unless starvation forced them to raid the farms. The humans sometimes transgressed on the forest, but they knew the price they might have to pay.
Actually, a certain amount of trade goods and visitors passed through the trees. But most of the traffic was by river. His mother and her companions had used the Gogz River for much of their journey southward to Glinda's capital. Baum had omitted this for story purposes or for reasons known only to himself.
The second touchdown for refueling in the forest was on a slanting meadow at the bottom of a mountain. The party sent in to prepare the way had cut down trees and uprooted the stumps and filled in the holes.
Between Quadlingland and Ozland was a range of mountains many of which were over 14,000 feet high. Hank did not like to take the Je
Ozland itself was as flat as Kansas, mainly farmland interspersed with large woodlands. The dirt roads were lined with fruit and nut trees planted hundreds of years ago. A person could walk from one town to another and not have to worry about going hungry, though that person might get tired of the limited diet.