Son of a Witch

by Gregory Maguire

  “Not a terrible choice.” The Superior Maunt began talking aloud, to keep her thoughts straight. “And I say this without need to reflect nicely on our own Saint Glinda, for whom Lady Chuffrey was probably named. Or renamed herself, Galinda a rural name, Glinda the more sophisticated: the saint’s name. Clever move.” No, Glinda, as she became known popularly—a single name, like a house pet, like a lapdog!—Glinda managed to run an open court for a while, and much that had gone wrong, at least in that prior atmosphere of Wizardic secrecy, was corrected. There was an inoculation initiative, very thoughtful. Some schools for millworker girls, of all things. Good programs—expensive to run, though. It had seemed generous and intelligent from the perspective of a cloistered spinster—but what kind of perspective was that?

  Then Glinda had stepped aside. Ever the dilettante, she’d grown bored with governing, people assumed, and had taken up collecting miniature furniture with a vengeance. Well, to be fair, maybe she’d been pushed out. For a while a puppet government replaced her. A right dolt, calling himself a Scarecrow. Rumors had flown that he was no real Scarecrow, that he wasn’t even the Scarecrow associated with the Visitor: Dorothy. He was just some out-of-work bum dressed up to fool the masses. Being paid every weekend at the back door, probably—but by whom? Glinda’s people? Her thwarters? The banker barons of industrial Gillikin? Who knew? In due course he was booted out by the latest nuisance, the next hollow man, reeking with glory: the sacred Emperor.

  The long years since Elphaba had driven her wild broom across the sky had been quiet—on the surface. Certain atrocities had ceased, and that was good. Other atrocities replaced them. Certain diseases subsided, others had taken grip. Now something was agitating the Scrow and the Yunamata in the West, something so fierce that agents from one or both of the tribes were striking out at neutral parties.

  Like the junior maunts sent out on a mission by the toadies helming the motherchapel in the Emerald City. Those sycophantic biddies! They’d cluck themselves to death if their Emperor asked it. Their emissaries, those innocent young things, had stopped here at the Cloister of Saint Glinda for nourishment and cheer. Where were their faces now, wondered the Superior Maunt. She hoped she’d never see them again, neither in her dreams nor in a parcel in the delivery of post.

  She was drifting off to sleep in her rocker. She arose, groaning at the pain in her joints, and tried to pull her shutters tight. One of them stuck and had to stay as it was. She’d meant to have it seen to this afternoon, but with the arrival of the caravan, she’d forgotten.

  She visited the toilet reserved for her private use, and dressed in her rough gown for the night. When she settled herself on her horsehair mattress, she hoped she would drift off quickly. It had been a taxing day.

  The jackal moon looked in her window at her. The Superior Maunt turned her head so as not to meet its eye, a folk custom with which she’d been raised seven, eight decades earlier, and never shaken.

  Her mind went briefly to those days in the Pertha Hills of Gillikin, days sharper and more wonderful in memory than what she could apprehend of current life. The taste of pearlfruit leaves! The water on her father’s wagon roof when the rains came. The rains came so much more often in her youth. The snow smelled of things. Everything smelled. Wonderfully or not, it was wonderful that they smelled. Now her nose hardly worked at all.

  She said a prayer or two.

  Liir. That was his name. Liir.

  She prayed to remember it when the time came for her to wake up.

  4

  THE NEXT MORNING, before Oatsie Manglehand gathered her band together for the final push to the Emerald City, she took Nubb to a small plain parlor. There they met with the Superior Maunt, Sister Doctor, and Sister Apothecaire.

  When the Superior Maunt sat down, the others sat. Since she abstained from morning tea, the others abstained.

  “If we are to help this boy, we must share what we know,” began the Superior Maunt. “I’ve picked up all sorts of hearsay. A report from Sister Doctor, if you please.”

  Sister Doctor, a beefy woman with questionable credentials but proven expertise in diagnosis, wasn’t sanguine about the prospects for the invalid. “He appears to have suffered little from exposure, so he will have been left for dead only shortly before you found him.”

  Oatsie didn’t speak to this. She didn’t want to begin by contradicting a professional woman, even if she thought Sister Doctor had to be wrong.

  Sister Doctor pressed on. “He is a shattered man, quite literally. It isn’t mine to guess how he came to be so wounded, but his state is like nothing I’ve ever seen. One of his legs is broken in multiple places; both his wrists are sprained. One of his shoulder blades is cracked. Many of his ribs. Four of his fingers. Three of the bones in his left foot. Not a single bone punctured the skin, however. And, apparently, no blood loss.”

  Not unless the blood ran off in the rain squall, thought Oatsie, but kept still.

  Sister Doctor rubbed the back of her neck and grimaced. “I spent so much time setting bones that I could do only a cursory exam of his organs. He is breathing shallowly and with difficulty. The phlegm that runs from his nose is both yellow and bloody. This suggests respiratory troubles. Sister Apothecaire has her own notions about this—”

  “To start with the question of the discharge,” began Sister Apothecaire, somewhat overenthusiastically, but Sister Doctor spoke over her.

  “Sister Apothecaire can speak presently. I utter no opinion about her…conjectures.”

  “The heart?” asked the Superior Maunt, overriding the old tired conflict.

  “Working.” Sister Doctor grunted as if in disbelief at her own answer.

  “The guts?”

  “The word might be wobbly. I suspect an imploded spleen or the like, and septic poisoning. There’s a funny color in the extremities and on certain contusions that I don’t care for at all.”

  “What color is that?” asked the Superior Maunt.

  Sister Doctor pursed her lips. “Well, I’m a bit overtired. We worked all night, you know, without resting. But I should have said there’s a green tinge to the bruises, ringed with a plum-yellowy margin.”

  “Suggestive of internal bleeding, you think…or a disease? Or maybe something else?”

  “He may be comatose or he may be brain-dead. I have no way of knowing. Though his heart is good, his color, as I say, is not, so circulation may be failing. The lungs have been compromised severely—whether by a preexisting condition or by some aspect of his adventures I cannot venture an opinion at this time.”

  “To conclude—” The Superior Maunt rolled her hand in the air.

  “Death by nightfall, maybe tomorrow morning,” said Sister Doctor.

  “We could pray for a miracle,” said Nubb. Oatsie snorted.

  “Sister Apothecaire will handle treatment,” said Sister Doctor, making it sound as if she thought prayer would be a wiser course.

  “You could pray for a miracle,” said Sister Apothecaire to Nubb. “I have other work to do.”

  “Sister Apothecaire,” said the Superior Maunt. “You have something to add?”

  Sister Apothecaire pushed her spectacles down her nose, then removed them, huffed upon them, and wiped them clean on the hem of her apron. She was a Munchkin and exhibited the Munchkin farmwife’s passion for hygiene—not a bad attribute for a person in her profession. “It’s all puzzling,” she agreed. “We have made him as comfortable as we could, and as the mercy of our mission requires. With tape we have bound his limbs to splints and shims. Should he live, he may regain some degree of motor function.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Oatsie. “Speak clearly to the ignorant. Me.”

  “He may be able to sit up, to use his hands, if his nerves are not shot to hell. He may be able to walk, in a fashion; that is unlikely, but as I say we aim for the stars. What is more troubling is the discharge from his membranes. The nose, most obviously, but the other orifices as well. Ears, eyes, anus, peni
s.”

  “You’ve had a chance to do some initial work in the laboratory,” prompted the Superior Maunt.

  “Indeed. Just a start. I’ve found nothing definitive, nothing I haven’t seen before, either in my station here at the mauntery or in my prior position as Matron’s Assistant at the Respite of Incurables in the Emerald City.”

  Sister Doctor rolled her eyes. Sister Apothecaire never lost an opportunity to publish her credentials.

  “Can you supply us with a hypothesis?” asked the Superior Maunt.

  “It would be rash to do so.” Even sitting, Sister Apothecaire was shorter than her peers, so her sideways glance at her disapproving colleague required her to poke her chin up, which perhaps gave her a more combative expression than she intended. “Whoever he is, I do wonder if this lad was from high altitudes. The mucous seepage may be due to the systemic collapse of arterial function due to a sudden change in air pressure. I haven’t seen such a symptom before, but the Fallows are very low ground indeed compared to the highest peaks of the Great Kells.”

  The way Sister Doctor murmured “mmmmm” made it plain to all what she thought of her colleague’s hypothesis. She straightened her spine as if to say, hurry up; her longer spine gave her height over her colleague, which she liked to use to advantage.

  The Superior Maunt intervened. “Do you agree with Sister Doctor that death is imminent?”

  Sister Apothecaire sniffed. The two didn’t like to agree on anything, but she couldn’t help it. She nodded her head. “There may be more to learn,” she added. “The longer he hangs on, the more chance I’ll have to study his nature.”

  “You will study nothing in his nature that isn’t directly related to the easing of his afflictions,” said the Superior Maunt mildly.

  “But Mother Maunt! It is in my charge as an apothecaire. The syndrome he dies from may afflict others in time, and this is an opportunity to learn. To turn our noses up at it is to discount revelation.”

  “I have delivered my opinion on the matter, and I expect it to be observed. Now, to you both: Is there anything we can do for him that we are not doing?”

  “Notify the next of kin,” said Sister Doctor.

  The Superior Maunt nodded and rubbed her eyes. She lifted a saucer of tea to her lips now, and without hesitation the others did the same.

  “I propose we get one of the sisters to play music for him, then,” she concluded. “If our only contribution is to ease his death, let us do what we can.”

  “Preferably not the sister who was torturing the harp when we arrived yesterday,” muttered Oatsie Manglehand.

  “Have you anything to add, Oatsie?” said the Superior Maunt. “I mean aside from your critique of musical performance?”

  “Only this,” said the caravan guide. I won’t bother to apologize for contradicting them, she decided. “Sister Doctor proposes that the boy would have been set upon by brigands and left to die only shortly before we found him. But the terrain out there, my friends, is flat as a rolled-out tart crust.”

  “I don’t follow,” said the Superior Maunt.

  “The body had to have been lying there for longer than Sister Doctor suggests. I would have seen the marauders in retreat. There was no place for them to hide. There is no tree cover. You know how bright a night it was; I could see for miles.”

  “Puzzling indeed.”

  “Do you use magic in your ministrations?”

  “Oatsie Manglehand,” said the Superior Maunt tiredly, “we are a sorority of unionist maunts. Such a question.” She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead with old, bowed fingers. Over her venerable figure, Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire both nodded silently to Oatsie: Yes. We do. What little we’re capable of. When we need to.

  The Superior Maunt continued. “Before resting for the night, I recalled his name. The boy was named Liir. He left the mauntery with Sister Saint Aelphaba—well, Elphaba, I suppose; she never professed her vows. Do you remember the boy at all, Sister Doctor?”

  “I had just arrived about the time Elphaba was setting out,” said Sister Doctor. “I remember Elphaba Thropp a little. I didn’t care for her. Her moods and silences seemed hostile rather than holy. Of the many urchins who are abandoned around here, however, I remember even less. Children don’t interest me unless they are gravely ill. Was he gravely ill?”

  “He is now,” said the Superior Maunt. “And somewhere, if his mind is still able to dream, he is still a child in there, I presume.”

  “Very sentimental indeed, Mother Maunt,” said Sister Doctor.

  “I do remember him, now you give his name,” said Oatsie Manglehand. “Not well, of course. In the better years I make three or four separate runs, and we’re talking twelve, fifteen, eighteen years ago? I have packed more than a few children onto heaps of worldly goods, and buried some by the side of the track as well. But he was a quiet lad, unsure of himself. He shadowed Elphaba as if she were his mother. Was she his mother?”

  “Oh, dubious, very dubious,” said Sister Doctor.

  “There is the green tone to his bruises,” Sister Apothecaire reminded them.

  “I blush when I’m embarrassed, Sister Apothecaire; this does not relate me to the radish,” said the Superior Maunt. “Well, we’ll have to ask around. Most of the older sisters who might have remembered Elphaba are dead now, and the others are in their second childhood. But Sister Cook, if she hasn’t been guzzling the cooking sherry—or perhaps if she has—she will know something. She always slips food to the children loitering in the kitchen yard, and she may remember where the boy came from.

  “Meanwhile”—and the good woman rose, to signal that the meeting was done—“we will do our best with Liir, whether he be witch’s spawn or the reject of a gypsy mother. It hardly matters on one’s deathbed from whom one has been born, does it? The world is the womb now, and the Afterlife waits for one to be born into it.”

  She turned rheumy eyes on Oatsie Manglehand. The wagoneer could see that the Superior Maunt was waiting, hopefully, for her own deliverance from this world and delivery unto the next. Oatsie accepted the old woman’s cool hands on her forehead, knowing the gesture was intended as a blessing, a forgiveness…perhaps a farewell.

  “The wind is high,” said Oatsie Manglehand. “If we leave now and find the water level low enough at the near ford, we’ll make the far bank of the Gillikin by nightfall.”

  “The Unnamed God speed your progress,” murmured the Superior Maunt, though her eyes had shunted inward, as if already on to the next problem. Indeed, she was. Before Oatsie had finished tying the strings of her boots, she heard the Superior Maunt say to her colleagues, “Now you must help me on the stairs, ladies, for I will go to visit our invalid.”

  “She’s a tough old bird,” muttered Oatsie to Nubb.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Nubb. “Don’t want to stay under any roofs that house a son of a witch, even if it’s holy roofs.”

  5

  THE MAUNTERY, the oldest bits of which dated back several hundred years, was conventionally arranged around a courtyard. The vernacular of austere Merthic style—flattened stone columns, bricked quoins devoid of plaster or wash—was indicative of the speed with which defensible households had needed to be raised.

  Up far too many stairs, the surgery included an office crammed into a closet, where Sister Doctor kept her notes and manuals. In a storage space under some eaves, Sister Apothecaire filled oaken cabinets with her unguents and restoratives, purgatives and negatives. (Small, as many Munchkins still were, she could work upright in a space too cramped for her colleague to stand upright in, so she got the private office. Endless grousing over this.)

  The surgery also gave onto two largish dormitories. The right-hand chamber served the poor and ill of the domain. The left chamber was reserved for ailing maunts. Through here, behind a stout door, loomed an odd-shaped space, the finial of a corner tower. Inside, therefore, it was a round room, with narrow slitted windows looking in three directions.
The room had no true walls or ceiling, just sloping rafters that met at the top of the conical space. A bedbound patient could stare up and see how the roof planking traversed the ribs. There were bats, but they were cleaner than most of the patients, so they were let be.

  It’s like nothing so much as being inside a witch’s hat, thought the Superior Maunt as she paused to catch her breath. Then she pushed aside the curtain and entered.

  Liir—if it was he, and she was rather certain it was—was laid upon the high bed more like a corpse than an invalid. “He’s been given no pillow?” asked the Superior Maunt in something of a whisper.

  “The neck.”

  “I see.” Well, there wasn’t much to see, really. His braced limbs were swathed in wide strips of gauze, his chest bound, his head undressed, and that dark hair cleaned with oil and herbs. His eyes, behind slits in the bandage, were closed. The lashes were long and feathery. “He has not been torrefied, has he? You have tucked him up like a victim of burns.”

  “The skin needs tending for the sores, so we cannot fully immobilize him.”

  I suspect not, thought the Superior Maunt.

  Her eyes weren’t what they had been. She leaned forward and looked closely at the seams where Liir’s upper and lower eyelids met.

  Then she lifted his left hand and studied his nails. His skin was clammy, like the rind of a valley-skark cheese. The fingernails were crazed.

  “Pull back his loincloth.”

  Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire exchanged glances and did as they were bade.

  The Superior Maunt had had little reason to become an expert in the male anatomy, but she showed no sign of pleasure or revulsion. She gently shifted the member this way and that, and lifted the testicles. “I ought to have brought my reading spectacles,” she murmured.

  She needed help straightening up. “Very well, do him up again,” she said. Her maunts obliged.

  “Sister Doctor,” said the Superior Maunt. “Sister Apothecaire. I will not have you loosen his bindings to show me the bruises you report. I rely on your perspicacity. However I make note here, and will do so formally in the Log of the House, that I observe no sign of greenness in his skin. I will tolerate no murmur belowstairs that we are harboring any sort of—aberration. If you have been indiscreet enough to propose such to your sisters, correct the damage at once. Is this understood?”