Al this clockwork commotion revealed a central arena, cloaked from view by a curtain as broad as two bed linens hemmed together. The drape must be stiffened with wooden braces. The surface of the cloth was painted with a fanciful map of Oz. More iconography than geography. The Emerald City glowed in the middle through some apparatus of backlighting; a loose approximation of the four main counties fanned out to the margins. Gilikin to the north, Quadling Country to the south, the Vinkus to the west, and Munchkinland—the Free State of Munchkinland, for her pains!—to the east.

She was sitting close enough to peer at the margins of the map. The outlying colonies and satrapies of Ugabu and the Glikkus. A few arrows pointing, variously, away, off margin, to countries across the band of deserts that isolated the giant Oz as competently as a ring of seas might, were seas anything other than a mystical notion of everlastingness.

Some sort of music began. She was dimly aware that the boys in their sunset robes had picked up nose whistles and cymberines, tympani and strikes. Someone drew a bow across a squash-belied violastrum. Someone lit a muskwax-taper that smeled of rose blossoms. To a man, the soldiers squatted, relaxing on their haunches; this was wel done enough to be convincing before it had even begun.

Cherrystone, she saw, was lighting a cigarette.

The dwarf gave a bow at the close of the prelude. The curtain rose on a lighted stage as the yard appreciably darkened by three or four degrees of violet.

A couple of figures strutted lazily onstage. What were they caled again? Homunculards. Puppets on strings. Marionettes, that was it. They were meant to resemble the Messiars and Menaciers squatting in the barnyard of Mockbeggar Hal, no doubt. They were hale and fit, and their ash limbs had been carved to exaggerate military physique. Waists tapered to pencil points, while biceps and buttocks and pectorals were al globular as oranges. Faces were blank but rosy-cheeked, and one chin had a sticking plaster across it, suggesting a soldier so young he was stil learning how to shave.

The two soldiers sauntered across the stage, looking hither and yon. Lights came up further to reveal the painted backdrop, which seemed to be a field of corn or wheat or cotton. A rough fence, a scarecrow, a few squiggles of bird painted in the sky across fat clouds in summersweet blue.

What craft the handlers showed! The puppet soldiers were bored. They whistled (how did they do that?). They kicked an imaginary stone back and forth. Funny how in the teling of it, thought Glinda, in the arc of the leading foot and the posture of the defense, the presence of the implied stone seemed as real, or even realer, than the puppet felows themselves.

The puppets soon tired of kick-the-pebble. They approached the front of the stage and looked out at the audience, but it was clear they weren’t peering at real soldiers in the gloaming. One of the carved Menaciers put a palm to his eyebrows as if shielding it from sun while he scanned the horizon. The other knelt down and dipped his hand a little below stage level, and the audience heard the sound of water swishing about. The puppet guard was meant to be on the shores of Restwater.