He glanced at the male moose standing by the side of her chair and the female bald eagle roosting on a wooden beam sticking out of a wall. They had said nothing so far, but it was obvious that her bodyguards understood what their mistress and her guest were saying.
"In any event," he said, "Your Witchness must be highly respected by your people. Otherwise, they would not call you the Good."
"I'm a very good witch," she said, smiling. "In fact, I'm so good that I should be called the Best."
He started to say that she must be pulling his leg, but he restrained himself. That phrase, literally translated, would probably not be understood in the American sense.
"You're having fun with me," he said. "I'm sure that that is not what they mean by the Good."
Glinda drank some milk, and she said, "You shouldn't be so sure of that. Or of anything. As yet. And perhaps never."
She could just as well be called Glinda the Ambiguous, he thought. Glinda. That meant both The Shining One and The Swift One. Glinda must be related to, have come from the same primitive Germanic word, as the English "glint."
He sipped the warm unpasteurized milk, and he shuddered a little. It stank like a cow, and he disliked its taste. But milk was healthy for him, and he would have to change many of his habits and tastes if he stayed here. Since it did not seem likely that he would get back to Earth, he might as well start now with his naturalization.
A woman servant picked up a napkin and patted Glinda's lips with the napkin. A woman standing by Stover started to do the same for him, but he said, "Ne, thungk thuk." It irritated him to be waited on, literally, hand and foot. He'd been raised in a house with ten servants, but he did not like this close, intent, and hovering attention.
Glinda popped several walnuts into her mouth—thank God, the servants did not feed her, that would have been too much—and she said, "You say that you're Dorothy's son. You do have her big dark green eyes, and your face reminds me of hers. But how do I know that you really are her child?"
"Why would I lie?"
"I don't have many enemies, but they're very powerful," she said. "And very clever."
"You mean that they might import me from Earth so that I could assassinate you," he said. He laughed. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown... no... paranoiac is the mind of the ruler.
She laughed, too, looking so beautiful that his chest ached. God, what an enchantress! Even if she was only four feet four inches tall.
"It is ridiculous, isn't it?" she said.
He held out to her the steel key and gold chain which he had removed from his leather jacket that morning.
"My mother gave me this to wear as a good-luck charm."
Glinda took it and turned it over and over. When she handed it back to him, she said, "It looks just like the key she had when she came here."
"It's the same one. I don't know if the house in which she rode the tornado into this world is still standing. But if it is, this key would unlock the front door."
"It's a state monument, and many Munchkins go to see it every year."
"I'd like to see it, too."
"You may be able to. Some day."
The servant asked softly if he was through eating or if he wished more. He told her that he was full. She probably agreed with him, since he had put away three times the amount she would have. After the table was cleared, Stover asked Glinda if he could smoke.
"Not in my presence," she said, smiling to take the sting out.
Stover put the pipe and tobacco pouch back into his jacket pocket.
"Now," she said, "you have told Lamblo your story of just how you entered into our world. But I would like it from you."
He obeyed. When he was finished, she said, "Apparently, you have no idea at all of why this happened."
"No. Does Your Witchness?"
"Not at the moment. Tell me what happened to Dorothy after I sent her home. Tell me of yourself."
That was not easy to do. He had to stop often and explain just what his references were. However, she understood more than he had thought she would, since Dorothy had explained so much to her. What a memory Glinda had! Tight as a banker's fist. She had apparently forgotten nothing his mother had told her.
Dorothy had been carried off in the farmhouse by a tornado, not a cyclone. Her uncle's farm had been a few miles out from Aberdeen, South Dakota, on that day of May 23, 1890.
"Not Kansas," he said. "South Dakota. Kansas is further south than South Dakota."
"What has South Dakota, whatever that is, to do with this?"
Stover sighed, and he said, "I wished I could sail a straight course. But we're going to be wandering through the Unexplained Seas."
"South Dakota?" she said firmly.
"What I have to explain is that an Earthman, an American, wrote a book about Dorothy's adventures here," he said. "But it was fiction or purported to be. Actually, much of it was fiction. And the parts that were true were bowdlerized. They had to be because he was writing a book for children."
"Bowdlerized?"
"Censored. Expurgated."
He had a hard time finding words which were the equivalent of censored. Finally, he gave up and defined the term.
"Mother was gone for six months, but, in the book this man, Lyman Frank Baum, wrote about her, she was here for only a few weeks. This man Baum was a fiction writer but at the time was the editor of a newspaper in Aberdeen. He heard about the little girl whom everybody thought had been carried off by the tornado. Her body was searched for but not found. People thought that she'd probably been dropped into a ravine or woods many miles from Aberdeen. Maybe the coyotes had eaten her.
"Then my mother showed up with a tale of having been transported to some unknown land beyond the desert in the Arizona Territory. At least, that's where she then thought she'd gone to. Of course, nobody believed her story about talking animals and people no taller than an eight-year-old child and an animated scarecrow and a woodman made of tin and witches and flying monkeys and all that. They thought that she was either lying or crazy."
"And so your mother quickly realized this and claimed that she had been delirious. Or something like that."
"How did you know?"
"Your mother was an extremely tough and adaptable child. Very matter of fact. She would have understood the best course to take once she saw that she was not believed."
"That's Mother all right. Rough and ready. A loving and sympathetic heart but very little sentimentality or soaring imagination. A brain as quick and tenacious as a wolf trap. Her attitude is: This is the way the world is, no matter how strange and unjust it seems, and I can handle it."
"An excellent character analysis," Glinda said. "But then what happened?"
"Baum heard about the child's story and went out to the farm to talk to her. Though he did not—probably—believe her, he pretended to. He took notes after his three conversations with her, but he did not print a word of it in the newspaper. That would have embarrassed Dorothy and her aunt and uncle and caused even more ridicule and doubt about her sanity or veracity. But he did not forget her fantastic tale, and, later, he used his notes as the basis for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.